.
Furthermore, I will ask you to interrupt your reading of this book as many times as possible, and perhaps – almost certainly – what you think during those intervals will be the best part of the book.
- Felisberto Hernández, Lands of Memory
.
July 22, 2011
July 18, 2011
Michèle Montrelay quote
.
Play [le jeu] rules the world. Play is everywhere, even where things seem to be most serious. The power that makes you hold your breath in a stadium, that inspires a crowd at a race track or poker players gathered all night around a card table, that’s the power we think of when we talk about the kind of fascination play exercises. But here I’m talking about extreme cases, stereotypical images that intensify and dramatize the thrill of the game. They make us forget that in a less obvious way, this pleasure is an indispensable part of everyday life. Naturally the more banal forms of play vary from country to country. I suppose hunting – on foot, with a rifle – isn’t as popular in the United States as it is here. In France hundreds of thousands of men await the opening of hunting season at the end of every summer, totally fixated on this dreamed-of moment, feverishly making a million and one preparations. Not to mention the political and athletic jousting that is ardently followed on television.
But the best playing field – and I think it’s the same in the United States as in all industrialized countries – is the professional workplace, because what is essential in order to succeed there is this gratuitous pleasure you take in overcoming obstacles, wrestling with the unknown, outplaying the adversary, even laughing with him. There is no discussion in business, however implacable, that does not partake of the tacit rules of the game, rules that confirm a kind of complicity among the players. As you know, without this no agreement can be reached.
There are many playing fields, including the arena of thought. And no one really talks about it, nor accords to this phenomenon the considerable importance it has in reality. To explain this lack of interest, we have to look at the difference between men and women. In the case of women, it is just as difficult to perceive its importance, but for the opposite reason; it’s that this phenomenon has not been experienced and acknowledged as such. You will say: but women play, and in all sorts of ways! Women can show themselves to be clever and able players, more than even their male partners! I agree with you completely on that point. But – there’s a big “but” – they play because of desires that for them count much more than the game itself: love, the need to possess I was speaking about earlier, eroticism, seduction. In short, women play games, but without being particularly concerned with what, for men, is the foundation of the game, namely, gratuitous pleasure. Don’t think that I’m telling you that men are better than women, that they’re more generous. Not at all: they’re no more angels than we are, they can be very partial when playing; in their endeavors, money and power play a considerable role, just as you say. But what you do not emphasize enough is that the power and the money are there as stakes of the game; they function as the bid or the winnings, increasing the pleasure of risk-taking, of going for broke. And a moment comes when even the most greedy of men, the biggest cheater of them all, starts to play for the sake of playing, forgetting about his own interests, accepting that finally everything, even the impossible, even failure, could be the outcome. Thus, it isn’t that players as individuals are disinterested, but rather that the pleasure of the game, which is far stronger than they are, makes them forget themselves.
When we see men playing together, we often regard them with a kind of amused compassion: they are children, we think to ourselves, their amusements aren’t really serious. And we don’t understand that this “not really serious” aspect of the game – its masculine dimension of gratuitous play – is the key, the very foundation of social power, from which women are excluded. Why? Because the game is not what interests women the most; because women are not “real” players; they lack that sense of free play that is, in essence, the spirit of the game.
Perhaps certain feminists have come up with the same analysis I am elaborating here. I would be interested in meeting them and finding out what practical conclusions they have drawn from their analysis, how it has helped them to determine what actions to take.
Now, to be realistic, we have to go even a bit further. We have to recognize the way in which women are excluded. Certain men – the really ferocious misogynists – exclude us deliberately. But the most common form of exclusion is the result of an anonymous yet organized collective. If we take seriously the idea that power is always instigated, articulated and distributed in a kind of playing field, then this collective must be conceived of accordingly. We should state the problem in the following way: it is the playing field itself that is excluding us, more than any particular man or men; men are really just the subjects, the pawns, of the game. The next step would be to specify exactly what this playing field consists of, taking the word “playing field” not simply as the designation of a circumscribed space, an area, but as the sphere specific to the masculine game itself. We’d have to try to comprehend its raison d’etre – something I won’t try to do here and now. The book I’m writing on masculine sexuality [L’Appareillage] begins with a discourse on play similar to the one I’ve just been giving you. This discourse begs for further elaboration, but rest assured, I’m not going to take it any further today!
Well, maybe just one more brief comment. This sphere can be thought of as an organism that possesses its own laws, organs, economy, and libido. Like a living body, it has its own system of expulsion. And we – women who aren’t “real” players – we are the foreign bodies ejected by this organism, we are like organs that are supposed to be grafted onto the organism, but that it can’t help but reject. That’s how we’re shut out – as if spontaneously, out of neither good nor bad will.
I believe that all the women who share a little bit of the power pie with men, those who are out on the playing field, and who thus work most effectively for the feminist cause, these women have sized up the game and the masculine pleasure that is part of it, and have discovered, whether consciously or unconsciously, how to come to terms with it. How? You’ll have to ask them.
- Michèle Montrelay
[This quote is from the book Shifting Scenes: Interviews on Women, Writing, and Politics in Post-68 France edited by By Alice A. Jardine and Anne M. Menke]
.
Play [le jeu] rules the world. Play is everywhere, even where things seem to be most serious. The power that makes you hold your breath in a stadium, that inspires a crowd at a race track or poker players gathered all night around a card table, that’s the power we think of when we talk about the kind of fascination play exercises. But here I’m talking about extreme cases, stereotypical images that intensify and dramatize the thrill of the game. They make us forget that in a less obvious way, this pleasure is an indispensable part of everyday life. Naturally the more banal forms of play vary from country to country. I suppose hunting – on foot, with a rifle – isn’t as popular in the United States as it is here. In France hundreds of thousands of men await the opening of hunting season at the end of every summer, totally fixated on this dreamed-of moment, feverishly making a million and one preparations. Not to mention the political and athletic jousting that is ardently followed on television.
But the best playing field – and I think it’s the same in the United States as in all industrialized countries – is the professional workplace, because what is essential in order to succeed there is this gratuitous pleasure you take in overcoming obstacles, wrestling with the unknown, outplaying the adversary, even laughing with him. There is no discussion in business, however implacable, that does not partake of the tacit rules of the game, rules that confirm a kind of complicity among the players. As you know, without this no agreement can be reached.
There are many playing fields, including the arena of thought. And no one really talks about it, nor accords to this phenomenon the considerable importance it has in reality. To explain this lack of interest, we have to look at the difference between men and women. In the case of women, it is just as difficult to perceive its importance, but for the opposite reason; it’s that this phenomenon has not been experienced and acknowledged as such. You will say: but women play, and in all sorts of ways! Women can show themselves to be clever and able players, more than even their male partners! I agree with you completely on that point. But – there’s a big “but” – they play because of desires that for them count much more than the game itself: love, the need to possess I was speaking about earlier, eroticism, seduction. In short, women play games, but without being particularly concerned with what, for men, is the foundation of the game, namely, gratuitous pleasure. Don’t think that I’m telling you that men are better than women, that they’re more generous. Not at all: they’re no more angels than we are, they can be very partial when playing; in their endeavors, money and power play a considerable role, just as you say. But what you do not emphasize enough is that the power and the money are there as stakes of the game; they function as the bid or the winnings, increasing the pleasure of risk-taking, of going for broke. And a moment comes when even the most greedy of men, the biggest cheater of them all, starts to play for the sake of playing, forgetting about his own interests, accepting that finally everything, even the impossible, even failure, could be the outcome. Thus, it isn’t that players as individuals are disinterested, but rather that the pleasure of the game, which is far stronger than they are, makes them forget themselves.
When we see men playing together, we often regard them with a kind of amused compassion: they are children, we think to ourselves, their amusements aren’t really serious. And we don’t understand that this “not really serious” aspect of the game – its masculine dimension of gratuitous play – is the key, the very foundation of social power, from which women are excluded. Why? Because the game is not what interests women the most; because women are not “real” players; they lack that sense of free play that is, in essence, the spirit of the game.
Perhaps certain feminists have come up with the same analysis I am elaborating here. I would be interested in meeting them and finding out what practical conclusions they have drawn from their analysis, how it has helped them to determine what actions to take.
Now, to be realistic, we have to go even a bit further. We have to recognize the way in which women are excluded. Certain men – the really ferocious misogynists – exclude us deliberately. But the most common form of exclusion is the result of an anonymous yet organized collective. If we take seriously the idea that power is always instigated, articulated and distributed in a kind of playing field, then this collective must be conceived of accordingly. We should state the problem in the following way: it is the playing field itself that is excluding us, more than any particular man or men; men are really just the subjects, the pawns, of the game. The next step would be to specify exactly what this playing field consists of, taking the word “playing field” not simply as the designation of a circumscribed space, an area, but as the sphere specific to the masculine game itself. We’d have to try to comprehend its raison d’etre – something I won’t try to do here and now. The book I’m writing on masculine sexuality [L’Appareillage] begins with a discourse on play similar to the one I’ve just been giving you. This discourse begs for further elaboration, but rest assured, I’m not going to take it any further today!
Well, maybe just one more brief comment. This sphere can be thought of as an organism that possesses its own laws, organs, economy, and libido. Like a living body, it has its own system of expulsion. And we – women who aren’t “real” players – we are the foreign bodies ejected by this organism, we are like organs that are supposed to be grafted onto the organism, but that it can’t help but reject. That’s how we’re shut out – as if spontaneously, out of neither good nor bad will.
I believe that all the women who share a little bit of the power pie with men, those who are out on the playing field, and who thus work most effectively for the feminist cause, these women have sized up the game and the masculine pleasure that is part of it, and have discovered, whether consciously or unconsciously, how to come to terms with it. How? You’ll have to ask them.
- Michèle Montrelay
[This quote is from the book Shifting Scenes: Interviews on Women, Writing, and Politics in Post-68 France edited by By Alice A. Jardine and Anne M. Menke]
.
July 17, 2011
After I kill myself...
.
After I kill myself, all the years of despair will suddenly become consequent.
.
After I kill myself, all the years of despair will suddenly become consequent.
.
July 10, 2011
July 5, 2011
A letter about The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information
.
Dear curious spectator,
I am currently reading the book Love Saves The Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979 by Tim Lawrence. (It is essentially a history of disco.) In it, there was one particular anecdote that fascinated me. In 1965, when the New York club Shephard’s replaced its house band with a DJ, the American Federation of Musicians picketed in protest.
This story echo’s many of my questions and artistic concerns. Is there something fundamentally different between the experience of going to see a live band and listening to a recording? Are there some essential attributes that make a performance situation ‘live’, and if so how do they differ from attributes of recorded media? Is a live experience more intense? More real? More immediate? More unexpected? I don’t have precise answers for any of these questions, but it’s my hope that our work itself is a kind of an answer, or at the very least a way of making such questions more rich, more complicated, of making them resonate.
In the above anecdote the DJ is literally putting the musicians out of work. (In such matters I always side with the union, but can’t fail to admit I love, and perhaps even prefer, listening to records.) It also suggests a certain dynamic between the individual and the community: the musicians cooperate with each other, they work, play (and in this case picket) together, while the DJ spins alone.
As we now know, the future was in many ways on the DJ’s side. We live in a world in which we are constantly surrounded by mediated experiences: photographs, television, movies, music, internet, advertising of every kind. I have always wondered if making a live performance might offer alternative ways of watching and of being together, ways that differ significantly from watching a movie or being on the internet.
In our new show The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information we play records and tell stories about them. We tell every kind of story: about bands, things that happened to us, to our friends and to complete strangers, theories about the world, about love and about life. They are stories that suggest the songs we listen to also affect how we think, live and understand our daily lives. The alternation between telling (live) stories and listening to (recorded) music also feels important to me. We have records by A Tribe Called Quest, Al Green, Broadcast, Burial, Caetano Veloso, Jacques Brel, Kronos Quartet, LCD Soundsystem, Omar Khorshid, Pavement, Prince, Public Enemy, Red Guitars, Robert Wyatt, Selda, Sister Nancy, The Ramones Eddie Kendricks, Cate le Bon, Hefner, Jane Weaver, Dirty Three, THEESatisfaction, The Jackson 5, Lloyd Miller, Nina Simone, Willy Thrasher and so many more. (I think we have about a hundred and seventy.)
I don’t think there’s anything particular you have to do to prepare yourself. For me this work is simply a place to relax, listen and enjoy. We don’t anticipate dancing but, then again, why not.
Hope to see you there.
Jacob Wren
Co-artistic Director
PME-ART
.
Dear curious spectator,
I am currently reading the book Love Saves The Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979 by Tim Lawrence. (It is essentially a history of disco.) In it, there was one particular anecdote that fascinated me. In 1965, when the New York club Shephard’s replaced its house band with a DJ, the American Federation of Musicians picketed in protest.
This story echo’s many of my questions and artistic concerns. Is there something fundamentally different between the experience of going to see a live band and listening to a recording? Are there some essential attributes that make a performance situation ‘live’, and if so how do they differ from attributes of recorded media? Is a live experience more intense? More real? More immediate? More unexpected? I don’t have precise answers for any of these questions, but it’s my hope that our work itself is a kind of an answer, or at the very least a way of making such questions more rich, more complicated, of making them resonate.
In the above anecdote the DJ is literally putting the musicians out of work. (In such matters I always side with the union, but can’t fail to admit I love, and perhaps even prefer, listening to records.) It also suggests a certain dynamic between the individual and the community: the musicians cooperate with each other, they work, play (and in this case picket) together, while the DJ spins alone.
As we now know, the future was in many ways on the DJ’s side. We live in a world in which we are constantly surrounded by mediated experiences: photographs, television, movies, music, internet, advertising of every kind. I have always wondered if making a live performance might offer alternative ways of watching and of being together, ways that differ significantly from watching a movie or being on the internet.
In our new show The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information we play records and tell stories about them. We tell every kind of story: about bands, things that happened to us, to our friends and to complete strangers, theories about the world, about love and about life. They are stories that suggest the songs we listen to also affect how we think, live and understand our daily lives. The alternation between telling (live) stories and listening to (recorded) music also feels important to me. We have records by A Tribe Called Quest, Al Green, Broadcast, Burial, Caetano Veloso, Jacques Brel, Kronos Quartet, LCD Soundsystem, Omar Khorshid, Pavement, Prince, Public Enemy, Red Guitars, Robert Wyatt, Selda, Sister Nancy, The Ramones Eddie Kendricks, Cate le Bon, Hefner, Jane Weaver, Dirty Three, THEESatisfaction, The Jackson 5, Lloyd Miller, Nina Simone, Willy Thrasher and so many more. (I think we have about a hundred and seventy.)
I don’t think there’s anything particular you have to do to prepare yourself. For me this work is simply a place to relax, listen and enjoy. We don’t anticipate dancing but, then again, why not.
Hope to see you there.
Jacob Wren
Co-artistic Director
PME-ART
.
June 28, 2011
Giorgio Agamben Quote
.
The ones who can call themselves contemporary are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity. Having said this much, we have nevertheless still not addressed our question. Why should we be at all interested in perceiving the obscurity that emanates from the epoch? Is darkness not precisely an anonymous experience that is by definition impenetrable, something that is not directed at us and thus cannot concern us? On the contrary, the contemporary is the person who perceives the darkness of his time as something that concerns him, as something that never ceases to engage him. Darkness is something that – more than any light – turns directly and singularly toward him. The contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time.
- Giorgio Agamben, What Is The Contemporary?
.
The ones who can call themselves contemporary are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity. Having said this much, we have nevertheless still not addressed our question. Why should we be at all interested in perceiving the obscurity that emanates from the epoch? Is darkness not precisely an anonymous experience that is by definition impenetrable, something that is not directed at us and thus cannot concern us? On the contrary, the contemporary is the person who perceives the darkness of his time as something that concerns him, as something that never ceases to engage him. Darkness is something that – more than any light – turns directly and singularly toward him. The contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time.
- Giorgio Agamben, What Is The Contemporary?
.
June 21, 2011
The Children's Book Writer
.
He preferred to write drunk. His books were more successful when he wrote them drunk. His theory was that his drunk books were looser and more anarchic, and children loved anarchy, meaning they still believed they would be happier if they could just do whatever they want. He didn't think of children when he wrote, he thought of drinking. The book he was currently working on was called Tears. It was about a child who cries and cries until her tears form a puddle, then a river, then a lake, then an ocean, until finally the entire world is covered in salty water. It was the drunkest book he had ever written, and when he thought of it this way he felt a little bit proud. Often, when he was drunk enough, he cried as well. He drank and wrote and cried and the tears in his eyes and the tears on the page were more or less the same tears. His publisher would worry the book was too sad to publish but eventually published it anyway. His publisher worried about his drinking. Sometimes he went to see prostitutes. He told the prostitutes he wrote children's books because he thought this might make him seem kind. Sometimes when he was with a prostitute he would cry and then he would tell her about the little girl whose tears became a puddle, a river, a lake, an ocean and then the entire world. The prostitute would roll her eyes but he wouldn't notice. When Tears was finally finished, late at night, he would walk by the children's bookstore and see his book in the window. One night when he was standing in front of the window a family with two small children also stopped to look. He pointed to the cover of Tears. "I wrote that," he said. They might have not completely believed him, but nonetheless seemed mildly impressed.
.
He preferred to write drunk. His books were more successful when he wrote them drunk. His theory was that his drunk books were looser and more anarchic, and children loved anarchy, meaning they still believed they would be happier if they could just do whatever they want. He didn't think of children when he wrote, he thought of drinking. The book he was currently working on was called Tears. It was about a child who cries and cries until her tears form a puddle, then a river, then a lake, then an ocean, until finally the entire world is covered in salty water. It was the drunkest book he had ever written, and when he thought of it this way he felt a little bit proud. Often, when he was drunk enough, he cried as well. He drank and wrote and cried and the tears in his eyes and the tears on the page were more or less the same tears. His publisher would worry the book was too sad to publish but eventually published it anyway. His publisher worried about his drinking. Sometimes he went to see prostitutes. He told the prostitutes he wrote children's books because he thought this might make him seem kind. Sometimes when he was with a prostitute he would cry and then he would tell her about the little girl whose tears became a puddle, a river, a lake, an ocean and then the entire world. The prostitute would roll her eyes but he wouldn't notice. When Tears was finally finished, late at night, he would walk by the children's bookstore and see his book in the window. One night when he was standing in front of the window a family with two small children also stopped to look. He pointed to the cover of Tears. "I wrote that," he said. They might have not completely believed him, but nonetheless seemed mildly impressed.
.
June 19, 2011
Book launch at the karaoke bar, a brief report
.
I stayed at the launch for approximately twenty-five minutes. I often go to events for a short amount of time. When Warhol was asked how he managed to be seen at all the parties on a given night, he replied it was simple: he walked in the front door, through the party, and directly out the back. I’m not especially like Warhol. At least I hope I’m more earnest, political and complex, plus I sometimes have a beard, but it’s difficult to generate an accurate assessment of one’s own practice or personality. During twenty-five minutes I bought the book but did not remove the shrink-wrap. I bought a vodka-tonic. The bartender gave me the vodka and tonic in separate glasses. When I poured the tonic into the vodka, the glass was still barely half full. I drank it quickly, out of nervousness but also because there wasn’t very much. I had short conversations with M and M-A. During the conversation with M he invited me to contribute to this zine. I had a slightly longer conversation with C during which she suggested we organize an event together, something really big. At the phrase ‘really big’ I must have turned unenthusiastic, because she said I looked afraid. It’s true I’m afraid of big gestures. With small things one can only have small failures. I love small failures. But with ‘really big’ you might actually burn down everything. Which I also like. Perhaps I’m afraid I like it too much. I’m afraid I like self-sabotage too much. C said that when I wasn’t afraid anymore we should talk, then went to say hello to other friends. For a split second I considered having another drink but was already out the door. Then I walked a route I’m not sure I’ve ever walked before, a shortcut: across the street, alongside a community garden, through an alley, alongside a playground. In the playground two small girls were in a spray of water jumping up and down over and over. I glanced at them and wondered if I had ever felt joy like that. I don’t believe I was a particularly joyous child. Moments later I was at Cagibi writing this report straight through in one go. I will have to remember that shortcut if I ever want to do karaoke. I love karaoke: the small failure par excellence.
.
I stayed at the launch for approximately twenty-five minutes. I often go to events for a short amount of time. When Warhol was asked how he managed to be seen at all the parties on a given night, he replied it was simple: he walked in the front door, through the party, and directly out the back. I’m not especially like Warhol. At least I hope I’m more earnest, political and complex, plus I sometimes have a beard, but it’s difficult to generate an accurate assessment of one’s own practice or personality. During twenty-five minutes I bought the book but did not remove the shrink-wrap. I bought a vodka-tonic. The bartender gave me the vodka and tonic in separate glasses. When I poured the tonic into the vodka, the glass was still barely half full. I drank it quickly, out of nervousness but also because there wasn’t very much. I had short conversations with M and M-A. During the conversation with M he invited me to contribute to this zine. I had a slightly longer conversation with C during which she suggested we organize an event together, something really big. At the phrase ‘really big’ I must have turned unenthusiastic, because she said I looked afraid. It’s true I’m afraid of big gestures. With small things one can only have small failures. I love small failures. But with ‘really big’ you might actually burn down everything. Which I also like. Perhaps I’m afraid I like it too much. I’m afraid I like self-sabotage too much. C said that when I wasn’t afraid anymore we should talk, then went to say hello to other friends. For a split second I considered having another drink but was already out the door. Then I walked a route I’m not sure I’ve ever walked before, a shortcut: across the street, alongside a community garden, through an alley, alongside a playground. In the playground two small girls were in a spray of water jumping up and down over and over. I glanced at them and wondered if I had ever felt joy like that. I don’t believe I was a particularly joyous child. Moments later I was at Cagibi writing this report straight through in one go. I will have to remember that shortcut if I ever want to do karaoke. I love karaoke: the small failure par excellence.
.
June 18, 2011
Unfinished and ridiculous poem tangentially about a certain view of Darwinism
.
Assholes are everywhere
in the trees and in the eaves
from summer skies to autumn leaves
telling lies and thwarting needs
they're everywhere
Assholes are everywhere
in governments and corner stores
from corporate law to dirty wars
they care who pays, count who scores
they're everywhere
Assholes are everywhere
getting worse, accruing power
from every bee to every flower
in hopeless sighs, endless tries
they're everywhere
Assholes are everywhere
in tanks and banks, in snakes and lakes
in violent shoves and on the make
for a quick buck, a quicker fuck
they're everywhere
Assholes are everywhere
in selfish genes, hipster scenes
the subtle ways that we come clean
when you say evolution it's not what you mean
they're everywhere
Assholes are everywhere
in hopeless bets, desperate wealth
when you won't help another but still help yourself
from savvy smiles, love defiled
they're everywhere
[Unfinished.]
.
Assholes are everywhere
in the trees and in the eaves
from summer skies to autumn leaves
telling lies and thwarting needs
they're everywhere
Assholes are everywhere
in governments and corner stores
from corporate law to dirty wars
they care who pays, count who scores
they're everywhere
Assholes are everywhere
getting worse, accruing power
from every bee to every flower
in hopeless sighs, endless tries
they're everywhere
Assholes are everywhere
in tanks and banks, in snakes and lakes
in violent shoves and on the make
for a quick buck, a quicker fuck
they're everywhere
Assholes are everywhere
in selfish genes, hipster scenes
the subtle ways that we come clean
when you say evolution it's not what you mean
they're everywhere
Assholes are everywhere
in hopeless bets, desperate wealth
when you won't help another but still help yourself
from savvy smiles, love defiled
they're everywhere
[Unfinished.]
.
June 14, 2011
What to do with the desire.
.
What to do with the desire? With the desire that cannot be sated. With the violence and anger that stems from this desire and with the violence and anger that blocks it out in equal parts. What to do with the lack of acceptable poetry in the world, with the utterly embarrassing and ridiculous nature of all poetic attempts? What to do with the unavoidable and sad and joyous everyday poetry that smacks against us like a violent storm? What to do with our paltry careers, that cannot satisfy and yet cannot be dismissed? It is criminal the way we live, with no hope or only false hope, and yet nothing we might call life is truly criminal. Stop being an artist in order to start. Different kinds of loneliness: in work, in crowds, alone, in love.
.
What to do with the desire? With the desire that cannot be sated. With the violence and anger that stems from this desire and with the violence and anger that blocks it out in equal parts. What to do with the lack of acceptable poetry in the world, with the utterly embarrassing and ridiculous nature of all poetic attempts? What to do with the unavoidable and sad and joyous everyday poetry that smacks against us like a violent storm? What to do with our paltry careers, that cannot satisfy and yet cannot be dismissed? It is criminal the way we live, with no hope or only false hope, and yet nothing we might call life is truly criminal. Stop being an artist in order to start. Different kinds of loneliness: in work, in crowds, alone, in love.
.
June 13, 2011
A corporate executive, a union member and a Tea Party member....
.
A corporate executive, a union member and a Tea Party member are sitting at a table. On the table are 10 cookies. The CEO reaches out and takes nine cookies at once and then turns to the Tea Party member and says, “Look out! That union guy is trying to take your cookie!”
.
A corporate executive, a union member and a Tea Party member are sitting at a table. On the table are 10 cookies. The CEO reaches out and takes nine cookies at once and then turns to the Tea Party member and says, “Look out! That union guy is trying to take your cookie!”
.
June 11, 2011
Lynne Tillman Quote
.
In Thailand the ad “Come alive – you’re the Pepsi generation” was translated into their language. It became, “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.”
- Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness
.
In Thailand the ad “Come alive – you’re the Pepsi generation” was translated into their language. It became, “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.”
- Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness
.
June 7, 2011
From Of Ourselves and of Our Origins by Peter Schjeldahl
.
An abundance of good art is being made today. It’s just not good for a lot that matters, in the reality-altering way that great art seems to. This is even more the case with criticism. The present sheer quantity of smart art writing is unusual, in my lifetime. But, similarly, the writing is not smart about very much. Critics now are good at answers. We’re short of good questions. This is a matter of how the world is. The world isn’t raising questions in forms that individuals can very well lay hold of. We might conclude that the world hates individuals, but that would be to flatter ourselves. The world doesn’t care.
I would like to be proved wrong tomorrow, when I come across new writing that is brilliant in itself, compelling in its comprehension of our lives in common, and suggestive of fruitful attitudes and actions – a game-changer. But I won’t bet on it.
Our part of the world is droopy these days, isn’t it? Prevalent are moods of frustration, senses of insufficiency and piled-up disappointments. The worst thing about this is that it conduces to despair, which conduces to bullshit. Bullshit is a time-honoured way of disguising voids of meaning and of getting by in life by getting around people, because who cares? I would like to think that some of us care or, at least, might act as if we care and see where that goes. Call it moral make-believe. Make-believe has nothing in common with bullshit, by the way. It requires absolute honesty. Ask any little kid.
[And also this:]
I saw recently that Bob Dylan was buttonholed by a fan who enthused, ‘You changed my life!’ Dylan replied: ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do about it?’
That was bad manners. It wouldn’t kill Bob Dylan to say thank you, fake it a little. But his point is impeccable. If you’re an artist, you don’t start the morning by saying to yourself, ‘Hey, think I’ll change some idiot’s life today’. You work. To be really good at anything, assuming that you’re talented, is to work harder and longer, with more ruthless honesty and discipline, than other people could do without bursting into tears. Your secret is that, hard as it may be, it doesn’t feel like work to you. It feels normal, like eating and sleeping. You are not about to hand your own life over to anybody to change or to not change, though you might wish you could. And you positively do not accept responsibility for the lives of your audience. That’s not good for them, and it is a day-spoiling pain in the ass for you.
So as an artist you’re lonely. You know the fragility and vulnerability of your Great Good Place but you lean your whole weight into it anyhow. Along with wanting fame and money and sex, like everybody, you want to slip that place into the map of the world, to make the world a little less wretched to you. You will even go without the fame and money and sex parts, if necessary. You will be misunderstood, often enough by people – darling dumbbells – who praise you. (Be kind to them if you can.) That’s the deal. No one said you were an artist. You said you were an artist. You asked for it. No whining.
[The full text of the Peter Schjeldahl talk can be found here.]
.
An abundance of good art is being made today. It’s just not good for a lot that matters, in the reality-altering way that great art seems to. This is even more the case with criticism. The present sheer quantity of smart art writing is unusual, in my lifetime. But, similarly, the writing is not smart about very much. Critics now are good at answers. We’re short of good questions. This is a matter of how the world is. The world isn’t raising questions in forms that individuals can very well lay hold of. We might conclude that the world hates individuals, but that would be to flatter ourselves. The world doesn’t care.
I would like to be proved wrong tomorrow, when I come across new writing that is brilliant in itself, compelling in its comprehension of our lives in common, and suggestive of fruitful attitudes and actions – a game-changer. But I won’t bet on it.
Our part of the world is droopy these days, isn’t it? Prevalent are moods of frustration, senses of insufficiency and piled-up disappointments. The worst thing about this is that it conduces to despair, which conduces to bullshit. Bullshit is a time-honoured way of disguising voids of meaning and of getting by in life by getting around people, because who cares? I would like to think that some of us care or, at least, might act as if we care and see where that goes. Call it moral make-believe. Make-believe has nothing in common with bullshit, by the way. It requires absolute honesty. Ask any little kid.
[And also this:]
I saw recently that Bob Dylan was buttonholed by a fan who enthused, ‘You changed my life!’ Dylan replied: ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do about it?’
That was bad manners. It wouldn’t kill Bob Dylan to say thank you, fake it a little. But his point is impeccable. If you’re an artist, you don’t start the morning by saying to yourself, ‘Hey, think I’ll change some idiot’s life today’. You work. To be really good at anything, assuming that you’re talented, is to work harder and longer, with more ruthless honesty and discipline, than other people could do without bursting into tears. Your secret is that, hard as it may be, it doesn’t feel like work to you. It feels normal, like eating and sleeping. You are not about to hand your own life over to anybody to change or to not change, though you might wish you could. And you positively do not accept responsibility for the lives of your audience. That’s not good for them, and it is a day-spoiling pain in the ass for you.
So as an artist you’re lonely. You know the fragility and vulnerability of your Great Good Place but you lean your whole weight into it anyhow. Along with wanting fame and money and sex, like everybody, you want to slip that place into the map of the world, to make the world a little less wretched to you. You will even go without the fame and money and sex parts, if necessary. You will be misunderstood, often enough by people – darling dumbbells – who praise you. (Be kind to them if you can.) That’s the deal. No one said you were an artist. You said you were an artist. You asked for it. No whining.
[The full text of the Peter Schjeldahl talk can be found here.]
.
June 3, 2011
The Facebook-Orwell Letters
.
[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.]
---------------------
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
---------------------
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
-----------------
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
-----------------
Dear users of Facebook,
There are millions and millions of you. If you wanted, you could start the revolution.
Sincerely, A
-----------------
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
-----------------
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
-----------------
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
-----------------
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
---------------------
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
.
[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.]
---------------------
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
---------------------
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
-----------------
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
-----------------
Dear users of Facebook,
There are millions and millions of you. If you wanted, you could start the revolution.
Sincerely, A
-----------------
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
-----------------
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
-----------------
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
-----------------
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
---------------------
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
.
May 29, 2011
Big Brother where art thou?
.
‘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
.
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.]
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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.
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Overanalyzing something that is actually, in fact, pretty stupid, like an unwillingness to admit how basic and manipulative the factors at play are. There must be more to it, the mind compulsively brays. And yes, of course, there is always more. But the essential thing is also the most obvious. A sadness that our world is not as complex as we’d like it to be. And that the pathetic, nasty, desperate action is little more than that, little more than show.
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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?
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When I first heard the phrase ‘workfare’ (a kind of welfare where the recipient is forced to work) my knee jerk reaction was that it was a proposal for some kind of contemporary slavery. But I’ve been thinking a lot about left-wing populism lately. And it got me wondering if there was some ethical way to positively connect the welfare state with voluntary community service. So that when one was unemployed one became more connected with ones community instead of less. And how one could be unemployed and still be of service to others, since being useful generates self-worth. There is often a kind of paradox in our culture that when people have more free time they have less resources to make use of it. What kind of model might make a welfare-community service connection possible? How to prevent such an idea from devolving into something ugly?
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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
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My work is basically an outgrowth of the anger I feel about the human condition. The aspects of it that make me angry are our capacity for cruelty and the ability people have to ignore situations they don’t like.
~ Bruce Nauman
I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.
~ Werner Herzog
What I’m interested in is happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life, the potential tragedy that lurks around every corner and the tragedy that actually is life.
~ Wolfgang Tillmans
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
~ Charles Darwin
Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.
~ Alain Badiou
I sometimes think that there is nothing but time, that what you see and what you feel is what time looks like at that moment.
~ Paul Thek
Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
~ W.S.Burroughs
Sometimes I am such an unbeliever, I can’t even bring myself to believe that there are people who don’t believe.
~ Sarah Vanhee
Because experience shows that there is nothing easier to instrumentalize than yesterday’s subversion.
~ Brian Holmes
Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration nor a disorderly sympathy but a fully developed method.
~ Gilles Deleuze
Art has no immediate future, because all art is collective and there is no more collective life.
~ Simone Weil
Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.
~ Stendhal
Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
~ Jean Genet
It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.
~ William Gaddis
I would like to dance with the people and with the things I’m working towards.
~ Avery F. Gordon
The art of the future is not connoisseurship, but labor itself transfigured.
~ Nikolai Tarabukin
The record, as usual, is not good. But on the other hand it is wonderful.
~ Caetano Veloso
The conflict between art and politics… cannot and must not be solved.
~ Hannah Arendt
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothing shows through.
~ Paul Valéry
There is no force like guilt to create intense reality effects.
~ Jan Verwoert
I recommend paranoia, it generates a lot of creativity
~ Jeanne Randolph
I’m what happens after death, which is writing.
~ Kathy Acker
Wishes are premonitions of abilities.
~ Goethe
I am at war with the obvious.
~ William Eggleston
Awkwardness is collaborative.
~ James Guida
I accept the world.
~ Margaret Fuller
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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
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Then I was reading about Jean-Luc Nancy, apparently he had a heart transplant 10 years ago, and when his body was rejecting the foreign body inside it, he found he finally could write the essay about immigration in France that Derrida had asked him to write years before - he understood the problem of immigration, through his body.
- Rosie, which I found here
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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.
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I have the feeling that affects don’t exist, that affects are just emotions viewed through the distorting lens of critical distance.
Every ten years I have a devastating life crisis which lasts for approximately ten years.
We are all tortured in our own way. My way is a lot.
The perfect revenge will be if someone is still reading our books long after all of the mediocre, but currently much more popular, writers are forgotten.
I don’t think it’s going to happen but, at the same time, I very much hope I’m wrong.
Glue awkwardness.
One potential fantasy among many.
An extreme and sometimes uncomfortable tenderness.
Against Virno's 'Post-Fordism is the communism of capital' we reply 'Neoliberalism is the totalitarianism of capital.' Searching for the rhetoric that will truly activate change.
Neoliberalism is the totalitarianism of capital.
Every country gets their thug.
Like wanting to have wild sex right after someone dies. – Lynne Tillman
There is no force like guilt to create intense reality effects. – Jan Verwoert
I recommend paranoia, it generates a lot of creativity – Jeanne Randolph
Okrent's Law: The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true."
Wren's law: Whatever you post on Facebook will come back to haunt you later.
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April 17, 2011
Politics is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them.
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I am really not trying to be cynical. Actually I think the dilemma to some degree flows from the very nature of politics. One thing the explosion of the avant-garde did accomplish was to destroy the boundaries between art and politics, to make clear in fact that art was always, really, a form of politics (or at least that this was always one thing that it was.) As a result the art world has been faced with the same fundamental dilemma as any form of politics: the impossibility of establishing its own legitimacy.
Let me explain what I mean by this.
It is the peculiar feature of political life that within it, behavior that could only otherwise be considered insane is perfectly effective. If you managed to convince everyone on earth that you can breathe under water, it won't make any difference: if you try it, you will still drown. On the other hand, if you could convince everyone in the entire world that you were King of France, then you would actually be the King of France. (In fact, it would probably work just to convince a substantial portion of the French civil service and military.)
This is the essence of politics. Politics is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge its essence. No king would openly admit he is king just because people think he is. Political power has to be constantly recreated by persuading others to recognize one's power; to do so, one pretty much invariably has to convince them that one's power has some basis other than their recognition. That basis may be almost anything— divine grace, character, genealogy, national destiny. But "make me your leader because if you do, I will be your leader" is not in itself a particularly compelling argument.
In this sense politics is very similar to magic, which in most times and places—as I discovered in Madagascar—is simultaneously recognized as something that works because people believe that it works; but also, that only works because people do not believe it works only because people believe it works. For this is why magic, whether in ancient Thessaly or the contemporary Trobriand Islands, always seems to dwell in an uncertain territory somewhere between poetic expression and outright fraud. And of course the same can usually be said of politics.
- David Graeber, The Sadness of Post-Workerism
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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
.
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
.
Recent developments in network science demonstrate structure in seemingly random networks. On the web, for example, sites are not equally likely to have the same number of links. Nor are links randomly distributed among sites in a predictable, bell-curve fashion. Instead, there are clusters and hubs wherein some sites are nodes to which many sites link. These hubs serve as connectors for other nodes. In his path-breaking work on structure in complex networks, Albert-László Barabási finds hubs on the Web, in Hollywood, in citation networks, phone networks, food webs in ecosystems, and even cellular networks where some molecules, like water, do much more work than others.
Barabási explains that degree distribution in networks with hubs, most real networks, follows a power-law. He writes, “Power laws mathematically formulate the fact that in most real networks the majority of nodes have only a few links and that these numerous tiny nodes coexist with a few big hubs, nodes with an anomalously high number of links. The few links connecting the smaller nodes to each other are not sufficient to ensure that the network is fully connected. This function is secured by the relatively rare hubs that keep real networks from falling apart.” In most real networks, nodes don’t have an average number of links. Rather, a few have exponentially more links than others. Barabási describes the difference between random networks and networks that follow a power-law degree distribution with the term scale. In random networks, there is a limit to the number of links a node can have as well as an average number of links. Random networks thus have a characteristic of “scale.” In most real networks, however, “there is no such thing as a characteristic node. We see a continuous hierarchy of nodes, spanning from the rare hubs to the numerous tiny nodes.” These networks don’t scale. They are “scale free.”
Barabási notes that others have observed power-law degree distributions. The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noticed that 20 percent of his peapods produced 80 percent of the peas – nature doesn’t always follow a bell curve. He also found that 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population. In business management circles, Pareto’s law is known at the 80/20 rule (although he did not use the term) and is said to apply in a variety of instances: “80 percent of the profits are produced by only 20 percent of the employees, 80 percent of customer service problems are created by only 20 percent of customers, 80 percent of decisions are made during 20 percent of meeting time, and so on.” Further examples might be Hollywood’s “A list” or the “A list” that emerged among bloggers. Like scale-free networks, Pareto’s law alerts us to distributions that follow power-laws.
How can power-laws be explained? Is some kind of sovereign authority redirecting nature out of a more primordial equality? Barabási finds that power-laws appear in phase transitions from disorder to order (he draws here from the Nobel prize-winning work of the physicist Kenneth Wilson.) Power-laws “are the patent signatures of self-organization in complex systems.” Analyzing power-laws on the web, Barabási identifies several properties that account for the Web’s characteristics as a scale-free network. The first is growth. New sites or nodes are added at a dizzying pace. If new sites decide randomly to link to different old sites, old sites will always have an advantage. Just by arriving first, they will accumulate more links. But growth alone can’t account for the power-law degree distribution. A second property is necessary, preferential attachment. New sites have to prefer older, more senior sites. Differently put, new sites will want to link to those sites that already have a lot of links. They don’t link randomly but to the most popular sites which thereby become hubs. Barabási argues that insofar as network evolution is governed by preferential attachment, one has to abandon the assumption that the Web (or Hollywood or any citation network) is democratic: “In real networks linking is never random. Instead, popularity is attractive.” Nodes that have been around for awhile, that have to an extent proven themselves, have distinct advantages over newcomers. In networks characterized by growth and preferential attachment, then, hubs emerge.
The fantasy of abundance – anyone can build a website, create a blog, express their opinions on the internet – misdirects some critical media theorists away from the structure of real networks. Alexander R. Galloway, for example, emphasizes “distributed networks” that have “no central hubs and no radial nodes.” He claims that the internet is a distributed network like the U.S. interstate highway system, a random network that scales, to use Barabási’s terms. Embracing Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s image of the rhizome, Galloway notes that in a rhizome any point can be connected to any other; there are no intermediary hubs and no hierarchies. For him, the Web is best understood rhizomatically, as having a rhizomatic structure. Barabási’s work demonstrates, however, that on the Web, as in any scale-free network, there are hubs and hierarchies. Some sites are more equal than others. Imagining a rhizome might be nice, but rhizomes don’t describe the underlying structure of real networks. Hierarchies and hubs emerge out of growth and preferential attachment.
- Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies
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March 8, 2011
Franco Berardi and Marco Jacquemet on The Italian Anomaly
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In that long wave of social conflicts we find a constant and recurring element: the refusal of the subordination of life to work. This refusal was manifest in a manifold of different ways: first of all as a Mediterranean idleness, the privileging of sensuality and social life over productivity and the economy. In the 1970s this refusal flourished as a political act of insubordination and resistance against capitalist exploitation. So this concept could be inserted in the framework of progressive political strategy. Workers refused the effort and repetitiveness of mechanical labour, thus forcing companies to keep restructuring. Workers’ resistance was an element of human progress and freedom, as well as an accelerator of technological and organizational development. Contrary to the Protestant idea of progress as founded on work discipline, the autonomous, anti-work spirit claims that progress, namely technological progress, is based on the refusal of discipline. Progress consists of the application of intelligence to the reduction of effort and dependency, and the expansion of a sphere of idleness and individual freedom.
The refusal of capitalist exploitation was not peculiar to Italy, of course. All around the world workers demanded wage increases and more free time for their lives. However, in Italy this insubordination transformed the anarchic spirit of southern plebs into an explicit and politically relevant issue: autonomy of everyday life from capitalist discipline. Did young rebel workers who in the 1970s came from Naples and from Calabria to the northern factories embody the individualist and anti-modernist populism that characterizes the 1799 counterrevolution, and led Neapolitan people to oppose the enlightened bourgeoisie? Yes, in part. But they expressed also the realization that the society of industrial labour was nearing its end, and the consciousness that industrial labour was a remnant of the past, and that new technologies and social knowledge were opening up the possibility of the liberation of society from the burden of physical labour.
- Franco Berardi and Marco Jacquemet, The Italian Anomaly
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In that long wave of social conflicts we find a constant and recurring element: the refusal of the subordination of life to work. This refusal was manifest in a manifold of different ways: first of all as a Mediterranean idleness, the privileging of sensuality and social life over productivity and the economy. In the 1970s this refusal flourished as a political act of insubordination and resistance against capitalist exploitation. So this concept could be inserted in the framework of progressive political strategy. Workers refused the effort and repetitiveness of mechanical labour, thus forcing companies to keep restructuring. Workers’ resistance was an element of human progress and freedom, as well as an accelerator of technological and organizational development. Contrary to the Protestant idea of progress as founded on work discipline, the autonomous, anti-work spirit claims that progress, namely technological progress, is based on the refusal of discipline. Progress consists of the application of intelligence to the reduction of effort and dependency, and the expansion of a sphere of idleness and individual freedom.
The refusal of capitalist exploitation was not peculiar to Italy, of course. All around the world workers demanded wage increases and more free time for their lives. However, in Italy this insubordination transformed the anarchic spirit of southern plebs into an explicit and politically relevant issue: autonomy of everyday life from capitalist discipline. Did young rebel workers who in the 1970s came from Naples and from Calabria to the northern factories embody the individualist and anti-modernist populism that characterizes the 1799 counterrevolution, and led Neapolitan people to oppose the enlightened bourgeoisie? Yes, in part. But they expressed also the realization that the society of industrial labour was nearing its end, and the consciousness that industrial labour was a remnant of the past, and that new technologies and social knowledge were opening up the possibility of the liberation of society from the burden of physical labour.
- Franco Berardi and Marco Jacquemet, The Italian Anomaly
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March 6, 2011
That we make our world is the time-full “truth” that “untruth” most wishes to silence.
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Spirit’s “true concern is the negation of reification.” That we make our world is the time-full “truth” that “untruth” most wishes to silence. Reification is that hardening of historically produced conditions into “second nature” – a totalizing ideological and material environment experienced as timeless and unchangeable. It is an enforced forgetting of the political “truth” that structural barbarism is not necessary, not an invariable. Collectively constructed, the given world system can be collectively changed. The practical problem of how to change it, at this point, requires radically rethinking the categories of revolutionary theory. But that the world can be changed – and that both the desire for change and the negative utopian images that provisionally orient that desire can be found within the failures and contradictions of the system itself – remains the core of “truth.” To keep this negative dialectic moving, to resist its arrest and regression, is the work and play of critical thought.
- Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory
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Spirit’s “true concern is the negation of reification.” That we make our world is the time-full “truth” that “untruth” most wishes to silence. Reification is that hardening of historically produced conditions into “second nature” – a totalizing ideological and material environment experienced as timeless and unchangeable. It is an enforced forgetting of the political “truth” that structural barbarism is not necessary, not an invariable. Collectively constructed, the given world system can be collectively changed. The practical problem of how to change it, at this point, requires radically rethinking the categories of revolutionary theory. But that the world can be changed – and that both the desire for change and the negative utopian images that provisionally orient that desire can be found within the failures and contradictions of the system itself – remains the core of “truth.” To keep this negative dialectic moving, to resist its arrest and regression, is the work and play of critical thought.
- Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory
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February 26, 2011
Insincere YouTube Auteur
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I wanted, I desired, to become the Jean Luc Godard of YouTube. Could there actually be a Jean Luc Godard of YouTube? I was in Brussels. Marcel Broodthaers was a Belgian conceptual artist from the sixties. He is very well regarded here in Belgium but I’m not sure how many people know about him back in Canada. There is a postcard of him staring out the back of a moving train, smiling and waving. Besides him is a small girl who is also smiling and waving. I used to have that postcard. I have no idea where it is now. But I kept thinking of that postcard and of these two Broodthaers quotes from 1964:
All my life I have been working with too much sincerity, trying to make works of art that would last forever, becoming quietly ridiculous in the attempt. I am 39. I too wondered if I couldn't sell something, or rather give something way for free, and therefore succeed in life. On YouTube I could be ephemeral, amateur, insincere in a way that simply felt impossible elsewhere in my life. Or so I hoped, desired. Could there be a Jean Luc Godard of YouTube? Is Lil B already the Jean Luc Godard of YouTube or is there room for me as well? Is Ryan Trecartin? I knew I meant something fairly specific with this idea, this desire, this phrase ‘YouTube auteur’, yet I still didn’t know exactly what. I knew I wanted to make video, or rather I didn’t want to make video at all, I wanted to make YouTube, perhaps make YouTube every day, seven days a week, have it watched by millions of people all around the world, and have those millions of people experience the work in a manner that effectively transcended how they had previously experienced the internet. I knew that by ‘YouTube’ I meant something both the same and radically different than what everyone else meant when they used the term, that my plan had absolutely nothing to do with videos of cats or babies eating lemons. But then again I didn’t know even that. Maybe there was room for cats, or at least kittens, somewhere within the labyrinthine vision of my daily YouTube making practice.
In 1960, with his debut film À bout de souffle, Godard invented the jump cut. He did so almost by accident. The conversation scenes he had shot were too long and boring, and he had no coverage, so he simply got rid of the boring parts, cutting from one highlight to the next. It was the simplest idea and yet apparently no one had tried it before. What has no one ever tried on YouTube and why do I feel certain someone else will think of it before me? And I don’t want them, those who are more clever, ingenious or simply much younger, to become the Jean Luc Godard’s of YouTube. I want it to be me, with my language, craft and insincerity. I want to think of the idea, the breakthrough, perhaps even tonight, purchase a video camera first thing tomorrow morning, start shooting. But not shooting just anything. Shooting something that will effortlessly manage to cut through, to shatter, the incessant chatter of the internet. Something that will accrue meaning with repeated viewings, inspire imitators, be critical towards the medium which it is simultaneously revolutionizing, change the fundamental ways in which YouTube videos are made and perceived. Clearly I do not know how to make this happen.
Godard invented the jump cut, emulated Hollywood while simultaneously disassembling it, was part of a zeitgeist that altered cinema forever. Broodthaters built his own museums long before such conceptual bait and switch was the art world norm. Where was the lever that could turn YouTube inside out, twist it around so it quietly, thrillingly, became new again? Why was I so certain this was possible and yet equally uncertain how? And why was I also certain that some strain of insincerity, of forcing the issue, lay at the heart of the project. Was it only that I had no idea how to proceed yet planed to blindly push forward regardless, marking any action I might take as insincere, motivated solely by the attempt to fill the empty husk of YouTube and not from any inner content or need? What was sincerity on the internet? Could it be anything other than a lure for endless anonymous ridicule? Did I want to be ridiculed? Ridiculed like a genius down into the grave?
I didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted to become the Jean Luc Godard of YouTube but instead wrote a 941 word text and published it on my blog, which is no more able to christen me the Jean Luc Godard of YouTube than I am able to christen it the Bible.
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I wanted, I desired, to become the Jean Luc Godard of YouTube. Could there actually be a Jean Luc Godard of YouTube? I was in Brussels. Marcel Broodthaers was a Belgian conceptual artist from the sixties. He is very well regarded here in Belgium but I’m not sure how many people know about him back in Canada. There is a postcard of him staring out the back of a moving train, smiling and waving. Besides him is a small girl who is also smiling and waving. I used to have that postcard. I have no idea where it is now. But I kept thinking of that postcard and of these two Broodthaers quotes from 1964:
I too wondered if I couldn't sell something and succeed in life. I had for quite a little while been good for nothing. I am forty years old... the idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind and I set to work at once.
In art exhibitions I often mused... Finally I would try to change into an amateur. I would revel in my bad faith... Since I couldn’t build a collection of my own, for lack of even the minimum of financial means, I had to find another way of dealing with the bad faith that allowed me to indulge in so many strong emotions. So, I said to myself, I’ll be a creator.
All my life I have been working with too much sincerity, trying to make works of art that would last forever, becoming quietly ridiculous in the attempt. I am 39. I too wondered if I couldn't sell something, or rather give something way for free, and therefore succeed in life. On YouTube I could be ephemeral, amateur, insincere in a way that simply felt impossible elsewhere in my life. Or so I hoped, desired. Could there be a Jean Luc Godard of YouTube? Is Lil B already the Jean Luc Godard of YouTube or is there room for me as well? Is Ryan Trecartin? I knew I meant something fairly specific with this idea, this desire, this phrase ‘YouTube auteur’, yet I still didn’t know exactly what. I knew I wanted to make video, or rather I didn’t want to make video at all, I wanted to make YouTube, perhaps make YouTube every day, seven days a week, have it watched by millions of people all around the world, and have those millions of people experience the work in a manner that effectively transcended how they had previously experienced the internet. I knew that by ‘YouTube’ I meant something both the same and radically different than what everyone else meant when they used the term, that my plan had absolutely nothing to do with videos of cats or babies eating lemons. But then again I didn’t know even that. Maybe there was room for cats, or at least kittens, somewhere within the labyrinthine vision of my daily YouTube making practice.
In 1960, with his debut film À bout de souffle, Godard invented the jump cut. He did so almost by accident. The conversation scenes he had shot were too long and boring, and he had no coverage, so he simply got rid of the boring parts, cutting from one highlight to the next. It was the simplest idea and yet apparently no one had tried it before. What has no one ever tried on YouTube and why do I feel certain someone else will think of it before me? And I don’t want them, those who are more clever, ingenious or simply much younger, to become the Jean Luc Godard’s of YouTube. I want it to be me, with my language, craft and insincerity. I want to think of the idea, the breakthrough, perhaps even tonight, purchase a video camera first thing tomorrow morning, start shooting. But not shooting just anything. Shooting something that will effortlessly manage to cut through, to shatter, the incessant chatter of the internet. Something that will accrue meaning with repeated viewings, inspire imitators, be critical towards the medium which it is simultaneously revolutionizing, change the fundamental ways in which YouTube videos are made and perceived. Clearly I do not know how to make this happen.
Godard invented the jump cut, emulated Hollywood while simultaneously disassembling it, was part of a zeitgeist that altered cinema forever. Broodthaters built his own museums long before such conceptual bait and switch was the art world norm. Where was the lever that could turn YouTube inside out, twist it around so it quietly, thrillingly, became new again? Why was I so certain this was possible and yet equally uncertain how? And why was I also certain that some strain of insincerity, of forcing the issue, lay at the heart of the project. Was it only that I had no idea how to proceed yet planed to blindly push forward regardless, marking any action I might take as insincere, motivated solely by the attempt to fill the empty husk of YouTube and not from any inner content or need? What was sincerity on the internet? Could it be anything other than a lure for endless anonymous ridicule? Did I want to be ridiculed? Ridiculed like a genius down into the grave?
I didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted to become the Jean Luc Godard of YouTube but instead wrote a 941 word text and published it on my blog, which is no more able to christen me the Jean Luc Godard of YouTube than I am able to christen it the Bible.
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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
.
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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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.]
.
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.]
.
February 9, 2011
Smarter than the world
.
This desire to be smarter than the world.
No one is smarter than the world.
The world isn’t even smart.
.
This desire to be smarter than the world.
No one is smarter than the world.
The world isn’t even smart.
.
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)
.
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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