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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 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
March 04 2012
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
November 26 2011
Occupy is a Revolutionary Subject or Still Life
- Balthus, Still Life, 1937
Occupy Wall Street as a Node of Resonance
The node of resonance analysis seems to me flawed because it takes the image from network theory. Receptive as well as resonant nodes imply a mechanical reduction: they are parts of a mechanism, not machines productive of transversal subjects.
Occupy has the power to effect change | Peter Hallward
Peter Hallward’s piece ignores even Judith Butler’s view of a material transformation effected by Occupy – which is at least suggestive – in favour of advocating a conventional protest movement, involving civil disobedience and non-compliance.
The tactics of occupation: Becoming cockroach
This is where the former analysis actually works, since it points out the difference between Occupy and a protest movement: the former does not Move! Here also the strength in the Cockroaches article is stasis. There is no movement.
What doesn’t happen when we stop? is the question. Not the more familiar: What happens? Or: What happens now that we have stopped here?
So: What or who cannot be excluded? Not: How can I be included?
Which points to Occupy as a simulation. There is an indication, several stories, an anecdote or two, that the Zuccotti Occupation began from an artistic reappropriation of the Tahrir Square Occupation. It was recognisable. People knew how to respond. And there was a sort of romance: maybe we are like Egyptians, fighting an overtly oppressive system.
It involved – and involves still, stillness being all – the putting into play of an aesthetic for which no further instructions were required. Simply occupy! It is this aesthetic phenomenon that the above analyses are trying to reduce to discourse, to analyse, to trace the outlines of, the etiology, the teleology, the origins and ends, and curlicuing, ornamenting out of sheer imaginative will, and failing to analyse, failing even to depict. Because such traditional forms of analysis are afraid of simulation, fakes, the hyperreal, or virtual.
Imagine a serious person finding value in the politically fake! There is an art to writing of such things.
What I would like to point out is that not only is Occupy not a movement, because it does not move, not only is Occupy a simulation, or fake, or play politics (!), but that in the bodies it immoblises it puts its own status – and stasis – at risk.
November 13 2011
Εμπρός – Mavili collective occupation of Embros Theatre Athens begins 11/11/11
- from – and more – from – here
the so-called re-activation of the theatre is temporary.
the question I would ask is how make it permanently temporary?
since the theatre is temporary.
a region of existential refrain. [Guattari]
I suggested a similar re-activation for Downstage theatre Wellington when it was announced it couldn’t afford to stay open after Radar’s one man show.
It has stayed open. But is in poor health. Negotiations were held with City Council. And, since, strategies have been put in place…
strategies…?
put in place…?
I still propose occupying Downstage.
Despite the depredations of prolonged use as a venue with skeletal administration – starvation in other words – and no company and the concomitant deterioration in the state of the building – through economic isolation although not an isolated case of it –
and despite the good intentions of Downstage’s board of governance and the rallying of the supporters’ society
and that of the negotiators
those theatrical healthcare officers
to devise a strategy for treatment [see here]
it is still that lovable bunker, the unfinished concrete interior of which once long ago caused some old ladies I overheard in an interval in the ambulatory to express their pleasure at buying tickets since the money would help pay to finish the building!
and meanwhile its present shameful disuse continues for the St. James theatre in Auckland … better occupy that than that excuse for a civic space, Aotea Square, in the land of the long white out …
November 09 2011
the cure is worse than the disease
going to the theatre is like visiting a good friend who is very ill. I am always afraid of what I will find when I get there.
What new ritual of humiliation will she have been subjected to in the name of making her better?
And usually there he is, good old friend, sitting up in bed, the room too warm, the view non-existent, the decor ugly, a grisly smile on his face as he says hello, hello to us all, and the face itself, now I look, what have they done to it?
Is there a mirror?
I immediately want to rush up and show her.
Was it always a question of make-up – too much make-up – to hide the facts, the cracks?
Was he always dying?
August 09 2011
to placard: letter on arts funding crisis, to demolish an idea
[-The following went to Spectre -]
State arts funding does not have the interests of the artist or of art at its centre as its reason. It is rather a symbolic – political and economic and ethological – allowance that such things might emerge as artists and arts which if they do may be managed and organised, judged and branded.
The critical economy appears to be the next major franchise, of the semantic Web, for example, as copyright on material expression ceases to stick, given digital dissolution, and ownership of opinion arises, stratifies and propagates through personalisation of services, through P2P recommendation. +, like, :> … However, arts funding provides pre-eminently for the ecology that supports managers, organisers, and critical apparati, even if the latter often give the impression of parasitism. When societies do not allow the critical threshold of economic freedom to be reached such that a stage of emergence can be insured, then what is at risk is an ecology or network.
The state in removing itself from the art/arts equation by withdrawing funding eliminates a hub from this network. This may not destroy the network but its deleterious effects will ramify throughout it.
The current system of tertiary student loans in New Zealand we know to cost more to run than the previous system of student allowances. In fact, this was known before the system was implemented. Likewise, looking only at economic indexes, cutting state funding for the arts, above an ascertainable threshold of sufficient funding, costs the state more than continuing its support.
How is it possible to ascertain the amount of funding that suffices? Where the existence of significant arts institutions is threatened, where that significance is given the larger meaning of ‘acting as a hub for the (artistic, social, civic, ethological, economic, political, critical, and so on) network,’ is where the threshold lies.
Theatres and cinemas are clearly hubs, but that the former is also an artistic hub, bringing the company responsible for the work together in the same institution as that in which it is shown. Theatre therefore displays even more hub-like characteristics when it has a resident company and is not simply the venue for visitors.
Much of this discussion seems to have recycled notions of economic lean-ness or efficiency, whereby the arts in Europe have grown fat, Brad Brace for one advocating a crash diet and the dynamic individualism of a lean mean art-making machine. [visit him here] Is an excess of funding than what suffices in sustaining significant arts institutions adequate justification to cut state funding?
I would like to live in a society in which such a problem arises. Justification is usually from the macroeconomic, with all the attendant ironies that even minor financial institutions are worthy of state bail-outs. And as they devolve on macroeconomic arguments they have recourse to the unscientific theories of fashionable economic thinking, or ideology.
It is this idea that cutting state funding somehow works or creates benefits that needs to be demolished.
July 05 2011
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