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March 28 2012
a statement on the Simulacrum & the Sensorium, of all things, inspired by & two unrelated sources gleaned from the discussion this month in soft_skinned_space
Brian Holmes’s “Three proposals for a real democracy – Information-Sharing to a Different Tune” [here]
Michel Bauwens’s “Scope, not scale: What do medieval monks, Cuban socialists and Wikipedia have in common?” [here]
The following was solicited by Johannes Birringer’s (of Alien Nation [here])question, a question in turn prompted by previous correspondence through the listserv but I hope worth presenting out of context:
Can you speak more about how this sensorium is politically effective to counterbalance the very symptoms of simulacrum hype (affective intensities of the commodity fetishisms and market imperatives to sell ourselves out)?
… a short speculative role play. It won’t be to
everybody’s tastes, for which I apologise in advance.
The Simulacrum can strike terror into our hearts, an original terror, in which some say the actions of terrorists insist, from which they emanate, as if playing out the drama of postlatecapitalism or the American way of life, arising from an inner tension. The Simulacrum is a monolithic trick, a symbolic joke or the joke of the Symbolic itself, being its Being, universal, irreversible, incurable, inescapable, but also immovable, unplayable, apolitical and yet somehow representational, implicated in representation for the multiplication beyond measure of its superfices, the extension beyond limit of its singular surface.
It offers the terrifying prospect of never again coming up against the real and remaining forever immobile in its circular logic. All action is futile and both resistance and resilience and indeed every participation becomes a mere accommodation and imbrication. To act is complicity. Folded into its surface we are then stretched out, all our good intentions betrayed, all secrets out like lights.
By contrast to this actionable futility the Sensorium offers the prospect of passive productivity: it provides a place to watch the Simulacrum from, in either isolation or alienation, floating, now unable to act. And yet embodying – by bodily affection, through the senses – an essential power, to desire, which we are reminded in so far as it is productive is a political act. There is a paradox here, but it has more to do with the relation between the Sensorium and the Simulacrum than the former alone.
This relation involves the putting into movement or play of what happens in place in the Sensorium when it hits the Simulacrum. Desire and act start to drift and for what they lose in emplacement they gain from playability, from being able to be reconfigured, transfigured – an interactivity and a compossibility. Sensorial capital is made pure data: it is put into play.
The eternity of the Simulacrum; the temporisation of the Sensorium; the depth as intensive spatium of the Sensorium; the pure surface extent of the Simulacrum; the organisation in depth of the Sensorium, its anatomy; and the inorganic fetishisation and inhumanity of the Simulacrum, its anatomisation. Organic, anorganic. Capitalist, capital: the capitalist experiences even as spectacle the speed and interconnectivity of markets. She experiences it as it registers on a surface which is the Simulacrum or the death drive.
The Sensorium connects or synthesises and organises and produces and what it is and what it produces is over time consumable. It wants. It gathers up the little objects of love and constitutes its partial subjects. It participates by participating in itself. It is able to act in networks.
The Sensorium is where what takes place takes place, the focus of a spectacle as much as of the Netopticon. But it is the Simulacrum which facilitates the sliding of this amateur theatrics, the migration of place by setting networks sliding where no point de capiton or place to hook is. Hooked in, you might say, we are set to slide, to join a universal elision.
How move the immovable which only ends up moving us? Because if the Simulacrum is the death drive it is also the spectacle of history. In which we participate passively in sympathy and actively in the desire which constitutes nothing less than the will to inscribe ourselves into history.
The question is wrong. How does the flow produced at the level of the Sensorium enter or alter the Simulacrum?
Production in the Sensorium is not recorded in or on the Simulacrum in the same way that it is produced. The relation is one of inscribability, recording of the Sensorium onto the Simulacrum. This amounts to an accommodation, of the former to the latter, but it is also an inscription of power.
Therefore it is to the Simulacrum that we look for the registration of the Sensorium in terms of political effect, the results of the political acts of the Sensorium, its political effectiveness and effectuality. Registration is the political act, the effect whereby protocols are no sooner written than they are performed.
March 18 2012
OCCUPYING THE PLACE LEFT RIGHT AFTER THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
what if Adam Curtis is right? [here] that the failure of the Left has more to do with the Right stealing all its best ideas than with anything intrinsically wrong with the Left itself. The Right showed that those ideas could work. Look at the success of the network! And of course the victim mentality of the Left bears witness to this. But then the Left didn’t fail, it lost. It lost the Revolution.
perhaps it has taken until now to realise this. Now in the new life political action appears to have we are in fact seeing the residues of a counter-revolution, the fallout from the Right’s decision to backtrack on and relinquish the good ideas it stole – from freedom, self-determination, fair competition, democracy to neoliberalism, market-led social policy, monopolistic trade, corpocratic control: the clampdown on the network that was the Counter-Revolution.
We never knew we had it so good until then! Now no wonder there is protest.
network critical: immanent effects
Albert-László Barabási has written two beautiful books dealing with network theory. It is in the second, however, that what was only latent in the first becomes clear. It is brought out in three ways: in this book Barabási shows that he is a writer; Bursts deals with network effects in time; and where the real world application of network theory worked by way of analogy in Linked, in the second, and under the auspices of time, it is the real world that takes over.
My question is: at the very time that we are most connected, why is it that we are most isolated?
It is as if they are part of the same problematic, as if the network connecting us itself provided the anatomy for our isolation, as for our connection.
It is also as if the very time were part of the problematic and the question had as much to do with its realism – its adequacy to reality – as the reality of what is purported and what purports to be current, present, relevant, even critical: the current “crisis.”
We are caught in a movement between Barabási’s two books. From the analogical real world application of network theory to the immanence of communicating networks in a real world in time. Moreover, the intensification of this critical moment, of this moment of crisis – the intensification of the crisis, then – could itself be a network effect, in Barabási’s words, a burst. That is, the fact of there being power-nodes operating in a spatialised network produces a concatenatory effect in time. Time is not indifferent, but broken or cut by moments of crisis: bursts of intensity, self-intensifying and self-exacerbating according to network effects.
The very time, however, is it one of crisis or continuity? How to judge, when the space-time network is so resilient, has been engineered to be so resilient, as to withstand, continue and even thrive in times of crisis!
The crisis of these very times may be prolonged indefinitely, exactly continuous with and in continuity with the network.
March 12 2012
good advice and lots of it
March 10 2012
March 08 2012
Paul Chan: decoupling life from the living decoupling the expansion of productivity from the producers it is not natural it is not even human it is religious
God lives on in the sacrament of exchange relations
the nature of spirit: music torture at Guantanamo Bay
power recedes – a church without authority is blessed indeed
eschatalogical art – art of the recessional: it is about last things and a hymn:
it is the last thing in the service
but the work of disarming is incredibly tense
tenser than the other kind, I think
we’re swimming in the heat of a religiosity which infuses everything
the sense of being impotently dragged along in its wake
is no reason to see it as natural, right?
that it’s just the way it is – that’s myth
that’s mythic thinking, right?
there’s a sense that Beckett is an abstract cold playwright
they’re in fact some of the most concrete things you’ll ever see
and New Orleans was the right place
because everyone knew what it meant to wait
and to shoot the shit while you were waiting,
there’s nothing conspiratorial
I mean they’re in plain sight.
the perennial self of domination
how do you survive without dominating?
because you think that only through domination can you survive
February 11 2012
and then perhaps I should start writing about what I am doing, begin a conceptual staging of my web project, let me know if you would like to read about it here. Until I hear from you, dear visitor, some gleanings, scratchings, fork&plate
‘Style,’ said Evelyn Waugh, ‘is not just avoiding the cliché. It’s avoiding the place where you can feel the cliché is being avoided.’
- in David Hare, Obedience, Struggle & Revolt, Faber and Faber, London, 2005, p. 140
By engagement, I mean not so much an exposition, or a critique, or both, but a path that cuts across these texts, a thought that attempts to find its way through them. Needless to say, this approach might be seen as involving a certain degree of violence. Yet this may well amount to nothing other than the irreducible degree of violence involved in the work of interpretation, which remains the sole form of fidelity toward what is most thought provoking.
- Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and genesis : philosophy as differential ontology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2004, p. 16
I once with, with Howard Brenton, wrote a play called Pravda, about a mad South African newspaper owner played by Anthony Hopkins as a kind of maquette for his subsequent Hannibal Lecter. Anxious lest our fictional proprietor be confused with a conspicuous real-life Australian, the Board of the nervous National Theatre insisted that we consult a QC. ‘Well,’ said this highly intelligent man, ‘as far as I can see, your play portrays a megalomaniac psychopath who drags his newspapers downmarket, who has no concern for editorial standards, who has no sexual pleasure except in public humiliation and violent dismissal of his staff, and whose only real interest is in the accumulation of a massive, unscrupulous and anti-social fortune for himself. If Rupert Murdoch really wants to step forward and identify himself as the hero of the play, then my advice would be: let him.’
In fact, Murdoch’s response to the play was characteristic. In Pravda, our Lambert le Roux adopts British citizenship specifically in order to be able to own British newspapers. Please not, six months after our opening night Murdoch decided to become an American, protesting that, like Lambert, he went through ‘the normal channels, albeit at unusual speed.’ Murdoch effectively treated our play not as a work of art, but as an inspirational business plan. Is Murdoch the only man on earth who could actually asset-strip a satire?
- David Hare, Obedience, Struggle & Revolt, Faber and Faber, London, 2005, pp. 127-8
if metaphysics, as a metaphysics of the ground, and of subjectivity – of subjectivity as constituting the very ground for the objectivity of objectal nature – is no longer possible, if philosophy can no longer turn to subjectivity as the transcendental site revealing the conditions of possibility of experience, and of beings as such and as a whole as a realm of objects, can it not undergo a transformation and reinvent itself, precisely out of this “crisis” of foundation? Can we not think the future of metaphysics, and the possibility of ontology, out of this very event, the event of un-grounding? And so, before proceeding with the rites of burial of philosophy, before declaring its death irreversible, and its new life as science – and, once again, that which, in the current institutional, professional, and cultural landscape, seems to testify to the good health of philosophy, in my mind only confirms the diagnosis I have just formulated – let us at least consider the possibility of a philosophy which, neither metaphysics in the sense of grounding, nor philosophy of science, nonetheless remains in relation to science, at once absolutely different from it and coextensive with it. What sort of relation would that be?
It is a relation born of this “crisis” of foundation. Yet because it is a relation, it does not coincide simply with a collapsing, whether understood as total collapse, or as a collapsing of the one (philosophy) into the other (science). Neither grounding (fondement) nor collapsing (effondrement), it is a relation of what, following Deleuze, we shall call an un-grounding (effondement). This concept is indicative of a twofold gesture, of a double possibility: the possibility of situating philosophy in relation to science anew, first of all; and, in close connection with this first possibility, the possibility of reasserting philosophy as ontology on the basis of a distinction in being between the actual, or the empirical (and the science it enables), and the virtual or transcendental horizon (which philosophy brings out) from which the former unfolds.
…
the transcendental no longer refers back to a transcendental subjectivity, but to the real as such. In effect, the transcendental no longer designates the conditions of possibility of (subjective) experience, nor the conditions of possibility of phenomena themselves. It now designates their real conditions of existence and is concerned with their actual generation and production.
…
The transcendental is therefore a dimension of the real itself.
- Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and genesis : philosophy as differential ontology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2004, pp. 21-2
January 26 2012
lynching, piracy, decapitation, abject media = subjection … and excerpts from Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
while nearby: piracy -
while art means action now
and action means decapitation
- the ritual slaying of Ronald McDonald
which could be the following:
is at least what the following wants needs likes follows shares and
adverts to in a culture of “distracted tactility” [Rachel Lee after Michael Taussig, 1991]
“This reminded Tengo of a certain event, something from the distant past that he would recall now and then. Something he could never forget. But he decided not to mention it. It would have been a long story. And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words.”
- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, trans. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011, p. 72
“The concepts of time, space, and possibility.
“Tengo knew that time could become deformed as it moved forward. Time itself was uniform in composition, but once consumed, it took on a deformed shape. One period of fime might be terribly heavy and long, while another could be light and short. Occasionally, the order of things could be reversed, and in the worst cases order itself could vanish entirely. Sometimes things that should not be there at all might be added onto time. By adjusting time this way to suit their own purposes, people probably adjusted the meaning of their existences. In other words, by adding such operations to time, they were able – but just barely – to preserve their own sanity. Surely, if a person had to accept the time through which he had just passed uniformly in the given order, his nerves could not bear the strain. Such a life, Tengo felt, would be sheer torture.
“Through the expansion of the brain, people had acquired the concept of temporality, but they simultaneously learned ways in which to change and adjust time. In parallel with their ceaseless consumption of time, people would ceaselessly reproduce time that they had mentally adjusted. This was no ordinary feat. No wonder the brain was said to consume forty percent of the body’s total energy!”
- Ibid., p. 275
my bookmark reads: strike!
TRIPLE DIP – STRIKE
“They’re both policemen now. Not too long ago, my uncle even received official commendation as an outstanding officer – thirty years of continuous service, major contributions to public safety in the district and to improvement of the environment. He was featured in the paper once for saving a stupid dog and her pup that wandered into a rail crossing.”
…
“The ones who did it can always rationalise their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don’t want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”
- Ibid., pp. 292-293
“I am a part of this world, and this world is a part of me.”
- Ibid., p. 855
January 22 2012
a season of birthdays, peppered with incident, highlights in my salt barrel include: organs and records, a hand, an absence of art, after maths, scoping out company offices, dinners of froth, jelly & Christ’s decomposition . find Alice
January 15 2012
December 30 2011
Once Upon A Time – Life: the entry so narrow; the exit so wide as to be everywhere around… the ‘utopias’ of ‘never again,’ Houellebecq on Houellebecq on William Morris: a fairy tale (illustrated by some of the Morris-like works of David Mabb painted by Rajendra Sharma)
- from the painting Blue Engineering Object by David Mabb (2001). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
People’s voices never change, no more than the expressions in their eyes. Amid the generalised physical collapse that is old age, the voice and the eyes bear painfully indisputable witness to the persistence of character, aspirations, and desires, everything that constitutes a human personality.
- Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, trans. Gavin Bowd, Heinemann, London, 2011, p. 152
A few seconds can be enough to decide a life, or at least to reveal its main direction.
- Ibid., p. 158
- based on a Photograph by Mikhail Kaufman, David Mabb in William Morris Fruit Suit, photograph by Robin Forster (2002). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
‘It’s the market,’ Pernaut said with a wide, beaming, rancourless smile, going so far as to pat him on the shoulder.
- Ibid., p. 159
- from the painting Fruit by David Mabb (2000). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
Sexuality is a fragile thing: it is difficult to enter, and easy to leave.
- Ibid., p. 163
- from the painting Morris Blue Willow/Popova Untitled by David Mabb (2005). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
‘William Morris, according to all we know about him, was someone quite extraordinary.’
…
‘William Morris didn’t lead a very happy life, according to the usual criteria,’ Houellebecq continued. ‘However, all the accounts show him to be joyful, optimistic, and active. At the age of twenty-three he met Jane Burden, who was eighteen and worked as a painter’s model. He married her two years later, and considered going into painting himself before giving up this idea, not feeling gifted enough – he respected painting above all else. He built a house according to his own plans, in Upton, on the banks of the Thames, and decorated it to live there with his wife and their two young daughters. His wife was, according to all those who met her, a great beauty; but she wasn’t faithful. In particular she had a liaison with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the head of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. William Morris had a lot of admiration for him as a painter. At the end he came to live with them, and basically supplanted Morris in the conjugal bed. Morris then made the journey to Iceland, learned the language, and started translating the sagas. After a few years he came back, and decided to have it out with them. Rossetti agreed to leave, but something had broken, and never again was there any real carnal intimacy between the couple. He was already involved in several social movements, but he left the Social Democratic Federation, which appeared to him too moderate, to create the Socialist League, which openly defended communist positions, and right until his death he gave all his energy to the communist cause, with countless articles, lectures, and meetings.’
…
‘He wanted to abolish school, thinking that children would learn better in an atmosphere of total freedom; he wanted to abolish prisons, thinking that remorse would be sufficient punishment for the criminal. It’s difficult to read all those absurdities without a mixture of compassion and dismay. And yet, and yet … ‘ Houellebecq hesitated, searching for his words.
- from the carpet design United Colours of Benetton by David Mabb (2005). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
‘Paradoxically, he had a certain success on the practical level. To put into practice his ideas on the return to artisanal production, very early on he created a firm for decoration and furniture; his employees worked much less than those in the factories of the time, which were nothing other than labour camps, but above all they worked freely and each was responsible for his task from start to finish. The essential principle of William Morris was that design and execution should never be separated, no more than they were in the Middle Ages. According to all the reports, the working conditions were idyllic: well-lit, well-aired workshops on the bank of a river.
- from the montage Transitional Monument by David Mabb (2004). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
All the profits were redistributed to the workers, except a small percentage which served to finance socialist propaganda. Well, against all expectations, success was immediate, including on the commercial level. After carpentery they became interested in jewellery, leatherwork, then stained-glass windows, cloth and tapestries, always with the same success: the firm Morris & Co. was constantly in profit, throughout its existence. This was achieved by none of the workers’ cooperatives that proliferated in the nineteenth century, be they the Fourierist phalansteries or Cabet’s Icarian community: not one of them managed to organise the efficient production of goods and foodstuffs. With the exception of the firm founded by William Morris you can only cite a succession of failures. Not to mention the communist societies that came later …’
…
- from the painting Head of a Peasant by David Mabb (2002) based on Kazimir Malevich’s Head of a Peasant. Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
‘What can undoubtedly be said is that the model of society proposed by William Morris certainly would not be utopian in a world where all men were like William Morris.’
- Ibid., pp. 173-175
- from the carpet design Lietuva by David Mabb (2005). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
I was reading Houellebecq speaking through his character Houellebecq when William Morris came up in a completely different context. Adam Curtis, the film-maker responsible for All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, mentions Morris. But where? Is it in reference to Fourier in his blog article “Dream On” [here], or in the second of the Little Atoms audio interviews conducted with Curtis following the release of All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace [here]?
And I am sure William Morris’s name came up a third time, in the same time frame, in connection with Félix Guattari.
I did find this Independent article by Sheila Rowbotham, however, which, along with having her delightful name to recommend it, contains the excellent phrase: “Both men reach out to the edge beyond what Morris called “Nowhere”.” [here]
December 23 2011
December 13 2011
a n e w w o r l d
c
a
c
h
e
x
i
a
December 08 2011
a list
the world
has been
keeping
its books
badly.
what has
value to
you?
make your
list.
not for your
god, judge
or accountant.
not for
the law,
the system
or the network.
make your account
for life,
for death.
what are you living for?
what is worth dying for?
the world
has been
keeping
its books
badly.
make
your
list.
November 28 2011
Social Swarm Spam
Subject: Invitation to the Social Swarm
Dear fellow people from the Internet.
We know that social network services changed the way we handle information and relationships.
But we also know that social network services create certain problems that come with storing large amounts of personal information.
We are concerned about our privacy on those services. The centralized nature of current social networks forces users to trust third parties that are not trustworthy.
We do not have to surrender to technology as it is.
We have to shape technology in a way that is suited to human nature.
This is why the goal should be to create a network that enables all of its users to communicate freely.
They must be able to use it in the way they want to, without being hindered by restrictions like censorship or the risk of losing control of their own content.
It is not about creating an alternative to existing social network services – it is about creating something even better.
There are different approaches to bringing this about, and they all have different up- and downsides. You are working on them. We are working on them.
So we ask you to join forces, with us and with each other, to create what we all are hoping for, what is driving us and what we need: A free and secure means of communication for everybody and everything.
To achieve this, we think the social network must satisfy these requirements:
1. Free software.
2. Good usability.
3. Decentralization.
4. End-to-end encryption.
5. Mandatory privacy: no plaintext data stored on servers.
6. Scalability.
7. Innovation over standards.
8. Better than what we currently have.
We would love to see you on our mailinglist:
https://mail.foebud.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/socialswarm-dev
To have a closer look at the project, go to our wiki:
Best wishes,
the folks of Social Swarm
Dear Social Swarm owner,
The following message under the subject heading “ignored options” was blocked twice when I tried to send it.
I have removed my hypertext link to squarewhiteworld – so let’s see if it’s that.
I don’t think it is spam. But perhaps you know better.
Best,
…
Dear Social Swarmers,
I find it strange that no option other than “earnest and honest privacy,” as Klaus Schleisiek put it, is being considered. What about open and public discussion and social intercourse with optional anonymity?
I am inspired by the idea of the listserv – and the Wiki – since these forms of interaction are subject- or theme-led and to an extent non-identitarian.
I am negatively inspired by the existing social media: but more for reasons of profiling and boxing of people into homogeneous blocs than for impinging on privacy; my objection is politico-aesthetic, not moral.
I’ve been working since March this year on a website based on these ignored ideas. Unfortunately, where I am in the world, New Zealand, makes it necessary for me to seek private sector funding to build a demonstration model and proof of concept, which is the task I am currently involved in – raising funds, validating need -, rather than public funding.
An irony. Since the idea has to be tangibly realised, needs to have gained sufficient commercial momentum in order that it is tangibly realised, before I can make it open source.
Another aspect of my idea that might interest discussants is that it is determinedly non-anglocentric. It enables multiple languages to be addressed, viewed, engaged with in the same view or browser window.
If you are interested, please contact me.
Best,
…
November 24 2011
shades
20 EU member states are now
under rightwing governments
in different shades
of blue
November 21 2011
reoccupation syndrome
spring back
fall forward
in this way you can be having revolution
and regressing
at the same time
November 17 2011
stop ic
NEW CENSORSHOP LAWS
THREATEN THE FREEDOM
(SUCH AS IT IS)
OF WIKILEAKS – SURPRISED?
YOUTUBE – …
AVAAZ – WHY?
AND PRESUMABLY ALL ONLINE
ACTIVISM & ACTIVIST
ORGANISATIONS USING THE
WORLD.WIDE.WEB
ACT NOW TO STOP
PROPOSED
BLACKLISTING
SIGN
November 15 2011
OWS
ARGUMENTS CAN BE REFUTED
ACTIONS CANNOT
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