RAMPAGE

The truth, this time

2011-09-15T00:09:00.001-04:00

CLAIM:

Contemporary truth is a certain kind of revelatory truth, that is, we may only be concerned with a truth so long as it exposes a lie, or makes a previous belief no longer possible.

Nostalgia

2011-09-15T00:08:00.001-04:00

CLAIM:

The drive toward the retro curve isn't nostalgia, it's contemporary hit-making: what can I revive first? Am I in the right revival? How can I sell 20 years ago better than my peer group?

Personal Currency

2011-09-15T00:03:00.002-04:00

CLAIM:

Talking about "personal secrets" as currency is like saying "life is just like a movie"- the symbol, wrongly, has been turned over; currency is our personal secret. Exchanging money is the symbol of the social exchange, and not the other way around. All economies are simulations.

Neat Doubles

2011-09-14T23:53:00.003-04:00

CLAIM:

There is an objective world, but it does not matter to a subject because a subjective experience of the world is all that is on offer.
If all human experience is by necessity subjective, that is, experienced through a subject, then the lack of any chance for an objective experience of any kind tends to make science look more like an agreement than a measurement.
That agreement justifies itself as a duplicate of the world, but one that does not mask the fact that all "truth" is a discussion.
The danger of Cartesian dualism is that the whole notion relies on intentionally thinking of thoughts as magic, and not made of the same stuff as the world.
The double I'm talking about is an agreed-upon double, a strictly representative double which occurs in description.

Various Mobs

2011-08-20T16:22:00.003-04:00

CLAIM:

The mistake inherent to any proposition including a "silent majority" is optimistically ignoring the variety and number of the disenfranchised.

Efficiency

2011-08-20T16:18:00.002-04:00

QUESTION:

Can anyone justify efficiency as a virtue? Secondly: is efficiency built into evolution? Third: who in their right mind would consider evolution a virtue besides the suicidal?

Skeptical Art Appreciation

2011-08-20T16:10:00.003-04:00

CLAIM:

Is skepticism, or irony in the sense that I take skepticism, the route to freedom? Saying "I doubt" is a form of power opposite to control, or, moreso, apposite to self control and a form of autonomy.
Free will and skepticism about genius, then, go hand in hand: the creator in any case is using a set of limitations to ask a question about the relationship between those limitations.
It's ridiculous to say that a sculpture is better than a painting, and so even more ridiculous to say that pleasure has anything to do with excellence. There is no important correlate between the plinth and the frame. Yet, when we use the word "art", we use it the way we use the word "hamburger". Art, meanwhile, has only ever been defined by apophatic conflict. Why is belief different from any other form of activity?

Evasion Values

2011-08-20T16:02:00.002-04:00

CLAIM:

Using economic or commodification arguments is trading one abstraction for another. That is, when we replace one value with another value in making a description for an object or subject, that unit remains empty, not described at all: for example, in Bourdieu, the cause of enjoyment is actually the function of enjoyment: but neither are a description of enjoyment.

I really lay into the term "Art"

2011-06-19T14:34:00.004-04:00

CLAIM:

Art isn't a class at all; it's a collection. Do we look at a film, a performance, a painting or a sculpture the same way? Are you kidding me?
Any definition of the word art abstracts the term further: every time, the act of defining alleviates no tension, and offers no connection between the objects it wants to define. Does anyone want to define art? Would the limitation cause some catastrophic implosion? In some partisan way, probably, for they central problem to agreeing to art as a category is that no-one agrees about the category.
For instance, the problem of economic or commodification arguments is one of trading one abstraction for another. That is, when we trade one value for another value in making a description for an object or subject, that unit (here, "art") remains empty, not described at all: the cause for enjoyment is actually the function of enjoyment, independently of a world the economy of enjoyment might describe were we to accept that existence precedes economics (apparently, some form of heresy).
This skepticism, an irony about economics, a doubt obverse to market teleology is apposite to self control and autonomy.
If we resist these abstractions, we see that it is ridiculous to say that a sculpture is better than a painting, that the there is no correlation between the plinth and the frame that is not trivial, and even more ridiculously trivial to say that pleasure has anything to do with excellence. In fact, extreme subjectivity, the "I" that denies shared experience, the reader that authors solely by reading, runs an absurd noncompliance with their own expression.
Free will and skepticism about individual genius, incidentally, go hand in hand: the creator in any case is using a set of limitations to ask a question about the relationship between those limitations. But to say that this describes art is to use the word art the way we use the word hamburger, for art has only ever been defined by poetry or apophasis.

Free will! Honestly!

2011-06-05T21:01:00.002-04:00

CLAIM:

Circumstance and consequence require a subject to carry them out, that is, in order to exist; so the cause in an originary sense can't precede existence except by circular argument. Therefore, also, causality cannot be used as an argument against free will.

Free will is certainly not disproven by laws of physics, either, only limited. To this end, it must be pointed out that arguments for free will are not by necessity arguments for unlimited free will, which would, in itself, require proof that no action has a consequence and that causality is absolutely nonexistent.

If free will were truly unlimited, that is, if all causality were original with no effect on any other cause, then there is no will, for the impossibility of will incompatible with cause is clear.

Single shots from my notebook

2011-06-05T20:45:00.003-04:00

CLAIMS:

Aesthetic judgement without universals can only yield probablility.

A great hope is that those who have fought for democracy will not squander it on polling.

The first part of accepting determinism in a radical naturalism is insisting on the impossibility of teleology.

The leash of causation- or responsibility- must be kept tight.

The problem with art criticism is the lack of a shared language.

We guilt those who do not vote, but we don't guilt anyone who refuses to answer polls over the phone.

Some would like science to say: "We can beat nature naturally."

If you're destined to lead, you're doomed to bad help.

That others are more wrong is enough to keep me going.

Irony is important precisely because economies are self-important.

Nerds are like scouts who find potential commodities.

To say "There is no normal" ignores the continuity between normal and abnormal.

Where did postmodern fluidity go?

The key issue with agreeing to "art" as a category is that no-one agrees about the category.

Rejecting baby-boom autonomous rebellion IS baby boom autonomous rebellion.

The economy is a metaphor unchained. What a monster!

When authority points out that you have it better than the less fortunate, they are threatening you with being less fortunate.

Do they not also get the right to lie?

2 on Christ and Marx

2011-05-08T22:49:00.002-04:00

CLAIM:
Part of what Christianity does is posit all nature and all relationships to nature as the Antichrist, or evil- it is a militant idealism.

CLAIM:
Marx, like Christ, is a figure offering a way out of the animal kingdom, out of nature, a way to transcend natural law.

It's not too loud, you're too young

2011-05-08T22:48:00.002-04:00

QUESTION:
Is it possible that the generation gap still exists and that it is solely about the hegemony and success of whichever generation you belong to?

Stop saying "art", maybe

2011-05-08T22:43:00.003-04:00

CLAIM:
The term "art" as a large umbrella for a number of contained and complex categories (whose overlap is much less causal than anyone admits) is possibly of no use whatsoever.
For example, when we say "art history", we really mean the histories of painting, first, and of sculpture, second, as they move toward the invention of the category "art" in the nineteenth century.
But this category is wrong: it treats "art" as the "kingdom" (in the sense a"animal kingdom"), when it is an "activity of the kingdom".

25 Year Olds

2011-05-08T22:41:00.002-04:00

CLAIM:
Part of the conceit of youth culture is an accelerated careerism: if you have not peaked by 25, it is as if you are being asked, "Well, what have you been doing?"
And between the lines: "Living your life is no excuse."

"Vote-Splitting"

2011-05-08T22:38:00.003-04:00

CLAIM:
The Canadian electorate are faced with a decision that they split in every election: what they want done, and the split: how to make sure that change does not occur.
It is this formula that promotes the stalemate between right and left wing: the left hand refuses to act except to hold the right hand in its place. But perhaps, the hands ought not to govern themselves.

Always, always, a silver lining

2011-05-08T22:36:00.003-04:00

CLAIM:
The problem facing democracy isn't ideology or corruption, but a culture of electoral eschatology wherein the division between voters is underscored by a belief that the other side has the will and the power to end civilization.

Nosferatu Election Strategies

2011-04-17T22:28:00.003-04:00

QUESTION:

Shouldn't liberals endeavour to reduce fear?
Or are we at the whim of two sets of conservatives: capitalist conservatives and socialist conservatives, blowing clouds of no-longer-at-ease from their dark castles?

Better value!

2011-04-17T22:23:00.002-04:00

Building on Rosset:

It isn't that there is fantasy and reality, but that the values we attach are always misleading- that is, we privilege the value we prefer to the value that is.

Prove the vote!

2011-04-17T22:21:00.002-04:00

QUESTION:

If the verificationists are correct, and politics is unintelligible, then does it matter which nonsense is chosen? Or, is the task to make an intelligible debate? What would a politics to satisfy verificationism look like?

Armageddon: I don't get it

2011-03-20T23:28:00.002-04:00

QUESTION:

Of Western eschatology, which is a fantasy, I ask: why is it so bad that we must be stopped or destroyed?
Can we not stop ourselves?
How great, how outside of our control, is this compulsion- whatever it is- that we cannot stop it ourselves and instead fantasize about a lethal Deus Ex Machina?

Note on the film Cold Weather

2011-02-24T21:45:00.001-05:00

CLAIM:

Cold Weather takes the mumblecore genre and turns it into a style. But it also turns it into a subtle polemic; in Cold Weather, it is only action and activity that count: there is no importance placed on the results of those deeds.
It almost suggests a plot in which the lives of the characters do not end.

Meaning is so huge we can't imagine it, either

2011-02-24T21:40:00.003-05:00

CLAIM:

Objectivity is measurable, but meaning- too often ignored, anyhow- is not. When I say meaning I mean the same thing as Lacan's symbolic order, Bergson's virtual, Hegelian immanence, and likely also Nietzsche and Schopenhauer's will.
Immeasurable subjects are the domain of aesthetics, and it is under this scheme that we can begin to think of a postanalytic aesthetic philosophy and criticism.
We can ask, "What is important to me?" and then continue to say that it is opbjectively true that we subjectively respond. But: what are the rules by which we subjectively respond? We can know this by our cultural values, our collective sense of individuality and authenticity.

The natural Real

2011-02-24T21:33:00.003-05:00

CLAIM:

We cannot imagine space with nothing in it.
Bear with me.
If everything is natural, nothing cannot be real, and there are no true differences in degree, only kind, then the problem we are faced with is that any problem whatsoever is a matter of asking the question correctly by working incorrect preceding answers out of the question we are asking.
I will remind you that doubting truth is pure humanism.
Not only is it likely impossible to imagine space with nothing in it, imagining nothing is, itself, nearly impossible, and describing nothing is also probably impossible.
In the idea "nothing" is the idea "thing"- so there is no point or difference between nothing and something as kind, only degree.
Following this logic, to oppose is foolish because it is a position of degree, not kind.
E.g., Communism is the same kind of thing as capitalism, because they are two degrees of economics. True change, then, will come from a system with no economy.

The Aesthetic Punch

2011-02-24T21:31:00.003-05:00

CLAIM:

If philosophy, as the analytics claim, is the study of propositions (perhaps...), then it is a study of language. If this is true, then the study of aesthetics is not merely possible, but wholly necessary.

Fear

2011-02-24T21:29:00.001-05:00

CLAIM:

It is the most insidious fear of all: masking itself as an original idea so you'll feel attached to it.

Dialectricks

2011-02-24T21:19:00.003-05:00

CLAIM:

In the same way that via capitalism/socialism the "Economy" replaced the "King", we ought to concieve of a political vocabulary that lowers the economy in the heirarchy of that vocabulary, where economy is secondary to citizen.

If the Marxist dialectic is is turned on Marxism, what does it find? A Hegelian inequity- that is, an increased tendency by the state as an individual, and, once individuated, actualized, fully counterrevolutionary. Marxism thus finds that the power structure of Marxism is that of the transcendental subject "worker state"- workers remain removed from themselves and their labour, forced now not only to act as representations of their own autonomy, but to represent a separate, autonomous unit that their autonomy depends on to survive. Marxist labour is held in thrall to a symbol of themselves as Catholic labour is in the thrall of the cathedral atop the village.

Nothing is treated as an end in itself: everything is done in the name of another virtue.

2011-02-24T21:17:00.002-05:00

QUESTION:

If the amount of information we have diminishes originality and creativity, does that not mean that ignorance and a lack of knowledge are conditions for creativity and originality?

Two sets of truth

2011-02-24T21:15:00.001-05:00

CLAIM:

A thing may be aesthetically true, but not scientifically.

CLAIM:

Ethics does not prove that the result of one action is better, but that the better result is certain.

What I mean when I say art

2011-02-24T21:11:00.003-05:00

CLAIM:

The issue of "art" is a matter of analogy, over time, being taken for fact.
This is what is going on when we argue about whether or not something is art, could or should be considered art, if a drawing or painting is art by virtue of art including painting under the rubric of artistic endeavour.

On generalizations

2011-02-24T21:08:00.002-05:00

CLAIM:

In contemporary thought, I see a problem of individuating things that are clearly dividual: i.e., not seeing seeing that the similarities outweigh the differences in any general context.
The accusation "generalization" only applies in an argument of specificity: when the case happens to be an individual, rather than many dividual elements.

Five on nature

2011-02-24T21:00:00.003-05:00

Natural science and Natural Medicine, in name, present such a logical fallacy that it is impossible to feel any optimism for their objectivity or efficacy.

What is the scientific definition of natural? Can any science exist without this definition, or must it be the other way around: all nature is defined by science, all science is a natural definition?

Unnatural is a value judgement, not a state.

An argument for the term unnatural goes as follows: how do we differentiate between a lake made by a glacier from a lake made by man?
By use of the term man-made: removing mankind's sublimity.

In Plato's Republic, if God authors good, then who authors bad? Nature.

In which I glibly equate Richard Dawkins and 14 year olds to make what I think is a valid point

2011-02-24T20:43:00.004-05:00

CLAIM:

The problem of science and philosophy and which is correct is this: we, as a society, will science to replace religion, rather than disable it: this should clear up any problem of seeing science as a religion, a typical mistake by both boosters of science (Dawkins, say) and science's detractors (a ninth grader who would rather sulk, for instance); science is not there for us to believe in, it is a tool. Belief, of course, is generally considered preferable to understanding in every way, because we may shape it as we wish.
Capitalism and communism, of course, both wanted science for themselves, despite science's clear distrust for any existing economy whatsoever. Economy, like religion, is terminally at odds with science- and here I mean economy in the sense that our social paradigm revolves around "economy", much in the way we used to believe the universe revolved around the Earth.
I think it is a mistake to say that philosophy is at odds with science, or science at odds with philosophy, except by misunderstanding on the part of acolytes bent on preserving a belief system.
To go back to my formulation of this problem, we have to accept that philosophy is also willed to replace religion. Clearly, it cannot: belief itself is anathema to philosophy, which cannot even will itself to believe in belief with any conviction.
Another way of putting this is that both philosophy and science are methods of determining truth-value, ways of figuring out how to ask a question, make a proposition that then creates the greatest number of better questions; that is, to understand, to come to terms with things as they are on their own terms, the best possible translation of the world into language.
Science is the organization of knowledge, philosophy the study of problems. There is no contradiction between the two, except by logical error.
Neither proposes any explanation whatsoever.

Nine on seeing

2011-02-24T20:38:00.006-05:00

Aesthetics- often regarded as a hobby branch of philosophy- is the only way to understand the news.

Deleuze, so far, has been the correct philosopher to ask questions about the internet to.

We've confused rationalizing and rationality, and in the process, we've rationalized ourselves out of ethics.

Withdrawing from the infinite: terrible idea.

Suppose the purpose of a database is to create a sort of permanent record of everything, to assume that everything that can occur is important to human knowledge?

The current state of Pythagorean disinterest.

Eternity is not the same as endless duration.

Are we aestheticizing politics to make them unintelligible? Is Zizek complicit in this process?

The interminable thirst for heterodoxy.

Quantity

2011-02-24T20:36:00.002-05:00

CLAIM:

Bergsonist logic would say that the internet merely gives us more information, and not knowledge at all: the intensity, the that is, the amount of information, does not become knowledge by virtue of that quantity.

P

2011-02-14T21:55:00.002-05:00

QUOTE:

"The notion of a crisis in history presupposes what it sets out to destroy- the idea of history as a continuous process, history with a capital H." -Alan Megill, Prophets of Extremity, P346.

The above aestheticism exists in the relation between politicians-as-celebrities and punditry's manufacture of Politics with a capital P.

Speed-Dating

2011-02-14T21:47:00.004-05:00

Q: Why are rehab shows so good to watch when you're high?
A: Rehab and teen pregnancy are the new frontier of realism: the abject heart, human life reduced to responsibility and responsibility alone- a bare ethics.

Irony: The content of the Morrissey song Reader Meet Author.

Before, smart people were called upon to hide their intelligence under threat of being called pompous: I declare a militant intelligentsia!

How everything gradually becomes the New Testament

2011-02-14T21:36:00.004-05:00

CLAIM:

A revision to "dialectic" could make the Marxist use of the term impossible, where in its present state it is conspicuously redundant (eg, that Marxism takes itself always as one-half of a dialectic for granted).
A progressive dialectic will posit the Marxist dialectic or, say, skepticism about the enlightenment (also a Marxist tactic) as former actions.
To put this in my own teleological dialectic, if the Marxist dialectic is turned on Marxism, what does it find? A Hegelian inequity- that is, an increased tendency by the revolutionary state towards the state as an individual, and, once individuated, fully counterrevolutionary (to borrow from Mao). Marxism thus finds that the power structure of Marxism is that of the transcendental subject "worker state"- workers are removed from themselves, forced now to represent not only their autonomy but a separate autonomous unit that their autonomy depends on to survive.
Their labour, now held in thrall to a symbol of themselves as Catholic labour is in the thrall of the cathedral atop the village (rapture).
The eschatology of the worker's revolution.
Any economy based on speculative growth is a materialist theology.

Four for the Weekend

2011-01-23T20:29:00.003-05:00

QUESTION:
How much of what I know do I know because of Mad Magazine?

CLAIM:
The sensation of every feeling you have ever remembered, all at once.

CLAIM:
We only free ourselves into the next prison.

CLAIM:
The new censorship is an absolute freedom for fiction to become truth.

Camera Ambiguus

2011-01-23T20:22:00.002-05:00

CLAIM:
Deleuze's Crystal Image is the nexus of the documentary gaze: not, "Is it real?" or, "Did it happen?", but, "Can it be real, can it happen, to me, in this space between perception and memory?"
Unsure of the crystal gaze, but sure that a state of absolute recollection, complete historical record- social, personal, and so on- will bring the world to us, that is, sense, know, remember, even if we weren't there- we impose the camera.

Meat is Psephology

2011-01-23T19:52:00.003-05:00

CLAIM:
Veganism/Animal Rights seems to stem from another, weirder decision: the animals we socialized.
Perhaps, then, the problem of animal rights can be located within the problem of human rights; that is, implicit in human rights is an inequality, a power transferred up to the arbiter of those rights. A right legislated by a power elite is a right waiting to be diminished, removed or bartered.

Pascal's Gambling Addict?

2010-11-28T15:31:00.004-05:00

CLAIM:
Here is what I see to be the problem of the transcendental- allowing, or forcing, depending on how you look at it, any-things to become "transcendent" or more than us, more than nature, is bad because it shifts the thing behind a shield, as Rosset says: it makes comprehension impossible, as we do not see the thing, only its transcendental substitute. It has left itself. We have left ourselves.
And that substitute is the source of a quagmire of definition: we do not have the definition of any-thing because we are always defining the object contained by the metaphor or substitution or comparison of the thing. We define the substitute, that which is standing in: not only do we not see the forest or the trees, we only see the sentence: "You cannot see the forest for the trees." Worse, each substitute has its own substitute: endless stand ins, endless metaphor posing as metonymy-as-efficient-definition.
What does this have to do with God?
Now, I don't care if one does or does not believe in God: I do care that the question not be recognized as one that holds meaning, or can lead to meaning, or, worse, is one that reason can be applied to, arriving at an allegedly rational "maybe"- this is because reason is not meant to be at stake here.
But it is: the agnostic claim to reason is so utterly unreasonable as to be detrimental to reason. Here, reason substitutes for faith: faith that there may or may not be God, and that we do not have proof, or that either answer can be possible because we cannot know, and so that it is reasonable to say, "we cannot know". It is true that there can be no proof. There is no chance for proof even before the question is asked. And on this point I agree with Ayer: it is simply not a question that holds any meaning whatsoever, except in the case that the agnostic missionary, with their message of not-knowing, may do harm to reason at the level of definition. Logic, reason, and proof (the retarded cousin of logic and reason) can only lead to one answer, which is that the question "Does God exist?" is a question that holds no meaning.
Again, if you need to believe in one or the other side of the God debate, but you;re not sure, so be it. I only begrudge the notion that this is a logical position. And, I object to automatic implication in the 3-way God tautology.
Now that I have made my argument that weak agnosticism is not logical, or reasonable, or benign, even, I want to focus on how this notion of "proof" is itself not verifiable: or do I?
The problem here, again, is one of substitution: science took on the project of removing divinity, yet, humans have by-and-large preserved divinity by saying "Because!" when science quietly insists "if... then," a procedure of rigour that is intolerable to the quest to escape reality at all costs. It is as if we believe that if we can argue for one reality, the strength of the argument will defeat the weakness of the actual situation. Sadly, this is not, and never will be, so.

QUESTION:
Is Pascal's Wager misunderstood?
It strikes me, in the midst of this claim that we substitute everything for everything out of a need for things to not be but also be, in a totalizing agnosticism based in fear of things being what they are but also that they simply may not be at all when really the awful truth is that they simply are as they appear to be (the catastrophe of our experience of reality, really), it strikes me that Pascal's refusal of the speculative ought to make us second-guess the commonly held belief that he is advocating some spineless passive theologism, and, in fact, he is leading us to the same theological noncognitivism that Ayer lays ground for.
That is, view the question without doubling: Is there a God? To say yes would require an argument that we cannot make, likewise, to say no requires an equally meaningless set of arguments. But, and here is what seems to trip people up where Padcal is concerned: it is not that we should believe that there could be a God in the event that he does exist, because that proposes that it is logical to preserve ourselves in case of what we simply cannot know: in every case- a God exists who will punish us, God may exist and as such may punish us, and God does not exist and we punish ourselves, we are fucked because we are believing in a question that substitutes the potential for God in the face of another, possibly equally metaphysical question: why is life so difficult?
Of course, any number of substitutions are present here: suffering, psychology, ethics, essentialism and so forth.
But Pascal, in substitution by way of a wager, is using the metaphor of gambling to show that the question itself is not reason. A gambler is probably inclined to suggest that it may not even be as rational as a poker hand: it is, then, a bet more suited to the comedic representation of a gambling addict, frazzled, sweating, about to literally put their soul- which has no literal value-
on the table because they unthinkingly cried out "Double or nothing, God exists!" in a desperate attempt to reverse the debt they have accrued between last call and dawn.
In fact, Pascal is saying that to say this question is fundamental is to be far beyond "going all in", to be so desperate in one's circumstances, so far past reason, that this wager seems to to that at-it's-limit mind to be the only way out.
But what are those dire circumstances? Surely, the suffering of day-to-day life is not so intolerable to so many that they would make a bet so ludicrous that any bookie or house dealer would tell them to pay up, go home, and give their head a shake. Indeed, too, it seems unlikely that this situation could even arise without a focused, obsessive effort on the part of the gambling addict: the betting would end long before they were so deeply in debt, unless they had convinced the bookie or the table that they could pay up.
So we find ourselves face-to-face with a philosophy that has made a concentrated effort to convince us that we will see our money if we let it play just one more hand.
That, literally, is what the question of God (if not a significant segment of Western Philosophy) has done: that is what Pascal is telling us. The player cannot pay. They are making bets that cannot be made. The question, strictly speaking, is not a question, the argument not an argument, and the logic not only not sound but as unreasonable as declaring "Double or nothing!" when one's bank account is in the red.

Flu Shots: Orphan thoughts culled from my notebook.

2010-11-05T23:49:00.005-04:00

SINCE HALLOWEEN:

Pet Sematary is warning us about nostalgia!

In art, the middle class cannot simply "be", because they are abject to the elite.

You have to make a conscious effort to remove narrative, and then it becomes about the absence of narrative, because that's so strange.

Art has a tendency toward objectification, even when there is no object; art that deals exclusively with subjectivity dooms the subject to the dismal fate of the object.

Bourriaud, like Guattari, makes a mistake ("the production of a subjectivity that is forever self-enriching its relationship with the world") about what the end goal of the Network Society is: a constantly destabilized capitalism, a capitalism that moves based on signifiers that never ground, on selling moods and identities rather than the intolerable slowness of any material.
Guattari is the architect of social networking sites!

The Liberal strategy: FEAR CONSERVATIVES!

Chuck Barris: cultural architect!

The problem is that you view the process as all-or-nothing; rather than test anything, you view the test, the attempt, as failure. Fortunately, Yoda is wrong: there is tonnes of try. Life is all try.

The lie on every political platform: that there is or will be money.

What do armchair pundits mean by "wheeling and dealing behind closed doors"? Where do they think meetings happen?

What (This editorial) really means (and doesn't seem to realize, likely out of despair or shock) that we tend to view ourselves as media outlets.

The best way to exert control is to convince people that they have something to lose: in tyranny, this is your life; in freedom, it is your lifestyle. The poor and homeless may as well be heads on stakes.

Ayer, Lacan, and Rosset are unlikely roommates: yet, all of them would agree we tend to make the real unintelligible.

Everyone would do well to protest more often, and less predictably.*

Liberal eschatology.

It's no surprise that Toronto is navel gazing: it's in Canada! There is no rest of the world for at least 6 hours!

Even if it were accepted that an artwork mean whatever we want it to mean, you can't look at a Richard Serra and say "this is about hippos" and hope to even take yourself seriously.

The Western delusion is that only we do the things we do. Moreover, the notion of "privilege" inherent here comes from "common sense", and not from fact.

Hickey: continuity
Bourriaud: progress

Is Ayer simply refusing to think through what sense-information inspires "metaphysics"?

*A facebook invite to a protest? Are you kidding? It's as if the world's supply of the element of surprise has run out.

Another bête noire laid soundly to rest

2010-10-17T16:22:00.002-04:00

CLAIM:
At a certain point, an infinite regression will become a digression: the infinite digression is life continuing regardless of the argument being made.

Human Narrative

2010-10-17T16:21:00.001-04:00

QUESTION:
Do narratives exist, or is it more of our almost genetic need to not only escape nature, but ourselves?
Is human nature "to exit"?

Auteur Theory

2010-10-17T16:19:00.002-04:00

CLAIM:
It's not that a director has generated the film, or pulled some elements together into a formal whole: it is that they are held responsible for the collective effort of making the film; their job is to say, "I am to blame for these hours."

Is mass culture a late modern myth? That is: has it fulfilled whatever its promise was?

2010-10-17T15:57:00.004-04:00

CLAIM:
Mass Culture is a leftover late modern fascination, like genius, like invention, but also neither of those things, being their reflection, the measure of genius or invention's hold on the collective curiosity: it is a product of broadcasting, and tends toward a narrative of transcendental becoming, and, moreover, that becoming is virtual: Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, The Beatles- all virtual heroes par excellence. This position is about being untouchable by the real, yet emergent from it: the demigod has risen to the peak of Olympus by pulling themselves out of the muck. Meanwhile, Olympus itself has to topple- in this way, our culture is closer to Norse mythology. The gods must start and end human, or become shameful. Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, why won't you die?
The question is one of balance, not whether or not the virtual or the actual is the point of origin, because the answer is both, but where the scales are tipping. And, of course, what use that imbalance is: what good is a virtual god right now when Midgard itself is virtual and Asgard, the ideal, is actual? When the real is myth, why mask our contempt for the virtual at all? Mass Culture has served its purpose, we hate it, and yet we persist in making real life not real until we make it intolerable and search for more real to ruin.
Not to let celebrity, and notions of celebrity, up and abscond with the topic.
Mass Culture as an oddity of of broadcasting becomes more strangely Dorian Grayed when the internet, also a form of broadcast, enables micro-culture: of course, the number of stations is still severely limited, or the number of stations we visit, rather- but in the way that "the movies" once attended to a wider audience than television and its choice of programs, television also is too broad, is too slow, pop music on the radio cannot keep up with blogging, podcasts and mix tapes, periodicals are almost depressingly obsolete in their slowness: the venues for mass culture are drying up around it, no-one will pay for it, and it stands to wonder if anyone will continue producing it.
This, of course, coud make one feel almost hopeful: but one horrible thing is always replaced by another.
The ochlocratic rule suggested by the Tea Party movement could be exactly mass politics: no wasted time by individual votes, no individual responsible for any decision, no leader, no celebrity (all, of course, paradoxically in the Stalinesque thrall of celebrities defying their agency as the voice of the mass, but still)- what better weapon against the iconic, virtual presidency of Barack Obama and the failures of virtual, iconic democracy, than an absolute iconoclasm: a living hammer that smashes communication by paradox? Culture is shattered.

Indian Call Centres

2010-10-17T15:53:00.002-04:00

CLAIM:
The fear of the other is not just at the root of western immigration policy, but at the root of outsourcing: late capitalism likes the affect of the working class, but cannot abide the reality.

Hitchens, Dawkins, Falwell, Marx, Freud

2010-10-17T15:50:00.002-04:00

APHORISM:
It is very much a question of method over belief: Marx has good methods, Freud has good methods: MArxism and Psychoanalysis are useless as belief. Science is a piss-poor belief system.

Accusations of pseudo-science may as well be a copy of Battlefield Earth to wash down a stress test.

"I hate Pink Floyd"

2010-10-17T15:47:00.002-04:00

QUESTION:
Is Punk's opposition to AOR- at the onset, at any rate- truly an opposition, or an ironic pose?
I think it's the latter, a challenge to the K-Tel compilation-buying, disposable single-obsessed wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am public, unwilling to view any creative effort as labour.

Beavers and their dams

2010-10-17T15:45:00.003-04:00

CLAIM:
Marxism contains a fiction- that our minds can overcome our bodies because we are human.
It is simply not so: we are bound to the bio-animal state we argue that we are above. All of our theories and tools do not, in the end, elevate us above beavers and their dams, except by sophistry.

1990

2010-10-17T15:42:00.003-04:00

THE ONTOLOGICAL PARADOX OF THE INTERNET:
It is real, but we insist that the contents are not real- or at least that they are a lesser real.

Monsters

2010-10-17T15:39:00.002-04:00

CLAIM:
Monsters are the real face of the imagined real, i.e.: life and death personified.
Every other image representing life and death id more metaphor than truth, more illusion than revelation.

The Punchline

2010-10-17T15:32:00.001-04:00

CLAIM:
Our insistence that horror is a fantasy IS the fantasy!

Poetry fails me when I fail poetry

2010-10-17T15:30:00.001-04:00

ADMISSION:
I'm not even sure how to read poetry:
am I reading too hard?

Not reading hard
enough?

The name stands in the way

2010-10-17T15:24:00.000-04:00

CLAIM:
What Baudrillard might mean is that once the name exists, once Husserlian classification sets in, the original- even if it faces you- is impossible. And following that, the real as a collection of unique originals collapses, with every original suggesting another original. Names prevent an originary real, description denies pure creation, and any attempt to reunite recognition and wonder is impossible.

I swear, the last things I will say on the topic of Relational Aesthetics

2010-10-02T09:47:00.002-04:00

CLAIM:
Of my bête noire, relational aesthetics, we can see this school of thought as the last gasp of deconstructive art, i.e., "contemplating... perpetual transactions with the subjectivity of others." It can also be seen as the further degradation of the line between art and fashion, but also style and entertainment: you are having a conversation with a celebrity.
This is not a conversation, per se: "the viewer", that wonderful transcendental subject, the object of irreducible subjectivity, in completing the work, is not saying much back to the work. They are also in no way the author: under the proposition that a work be made with awareness that the viewer may author it, the viewer themselves is authored in the most closed of open texts (or is it the most open of closed texts?), where their predictable subjectivities are appealed to as the building of an author might appeal to a god. But, like the gospel, the god in question is the one both worshipped and written by the author: "I am writing the fate that is out of my hands."
Moreover, how wonderful for artists and curators! The artist functions as a sort of subcontractor, a sub-curator, and then, like Tom Sawyer painted the fence, tells people that they finally get to complete the artwork. In a conservative persuasuion, this is lazy; on the other hand, this is the owner of the factory asking his customers to volunteer and still handing them with the bill for the goods.
Of course, in the hands of "people", this is supposedly emancipatory; in the hands of professional artists, it is indentured labour. Either the artist is exploiting the spectator or art is "of the people", marginalized, unprofessional. The paupers act as princes, and yet power is elusive to all involved.
Art, artist and spectator must not exist in a state alienated from labour or alienated from exchange, social or otherwise. In fact, the aspect of social exchange must not be abstracted from labour into social labour. We escape society by being social: this is the most absurd tautology. Socializing is being stolen from us and sold back at unsustainable cost. Someone is taking credit for it, alienating it from us. They are telling you you don't know how to socialize correctly.
And to answer my own question, for art to enter politics as politics and not merely political, via the intervention, to demonstrate the ideology of creativity where creativity is presumed absent, is clearly the colonial attitude in practice: enlightening the savages, stirring the spirits of those whom the church believes have no spiritual life, because it is not the life of the church. Art must be art in a subway station just as Christ must be Christmas in the mall, or Christ must recieve all of the prayer in Ghana.
This is the cultural economy, the spiritual economy, of the Creative Class, the cultural revolution if this cuddly Mao: vicious sinecures and Improv Everywhere as an imperative- not a suggestion, but a demand at gunpoint. The sign beneath the barbed wire will read: "FUN WILL MAKE YOU FREE".

Portable Virtuals, or, the parts of you that interest me are accessible to me all of the time

2010-09-23T20:33:00.000-04:00

QUESTION:
What is our relationship to IRL, i.e., our immediate surroundings, when online or the virtual may now accompany us? Is this a degree of temptation? Will this question be answered? Why does there have to be a compromise when the portable virtual, itself, did not spring from need, but desire alone, as a means to satisfy impatience and boredom?

The Colony

2010-09-23T20:01:00.000-04:00

CLAIM:
The Colony is, quite simply, the most entertaining program on television. Read on, after watching the link, streaming an entire season, etc.

The Colony argues for a mode of reality where common sense itself is the only prophecy; it is not a matter of survival, but of outrunning certain destruction.
That is to say, more often than not the story is told from the point of view of security: it is not that anyone is surviving, per se, but that they are competing: how it is that dog eats dog.
The program's other peculiar fixation is with luxuries: showers, coffee, and so forth. Here, coffee is a catalyst for intimacy: one character (and they are characters, proper: it would be a test of one's will to believe in The COlony as a reality show) is only barely civil when he is finally, after alleged days, presented with a cup of coffee. The proposed truth here is obvious: we are only social when we may avail ourselves of the material tools of the social- the basket precedes both the chicken and the egg.
This, of course, is the basis of security: were it not for the basket, the chicken would devour the egg or drown in them.
And so it goes. Everything is positioned thusly: I only trust you insofar as you are not killing me at the moment.
This is just proposing a rule of material civility. In a way, there is a natural truth here: but at the same time, a reverse anthropomorphism. We will descend to the actions of beasts; never mind that we are already beast, with our own psychology dictating our actions.
And this, hidden in plain view in the title, adds up to the argument the show is making: the disaster-prone third world is run by scavengers and marauders, and the job of the first world is to bequeath this material civility upon the third world (still)- that is, the colony provides a rationale for colonization. It is not that terrorists are in one way or another ideologues, but that they are guileless marauders, left only to violence to obtain food, shelter, and of course power. Colonize them!

ADDITIONAL NOTES:

- The "security expert" on The Colony naturally wears no tie- what he is telling you is off the record, is candid, is stark in its frankness.
- There is a montage of "Hurricane Katrina" footage in the second episode; all of the people in it are, of course, black, but also- in a show of impressive racism and bravado on the part of the editors and producers of the show- menacingly apelike.
- The marauders tail around on motorbikes; the answer to any question of vehicle-as-weapon, somehow implicating the bicycle by attrition.

There is no "infinite regress": Grow Up

2010-09-23T19:55:00.000-04:00

CLAIM:

The accusation of an infinite regress is a pat sinecure. This is logic willfully abandoning reason. The very notion of reducing forever backward, the absence of the irreducible (essentially an agreement, anyway), is arch sophistry: that so long as we grip the object tightly, squeeze it to death, that this means that objectivity is under our rule. But it, of course, is the rule of a king whose court will not tell him that he is not God for fear of being beheaded.

Scmelational Schmaesthetics, if I may!

2010-09-23T19:43:00.001-04:00

CLAIM:
So-called Relational Aesthetics is just a reversal of former "Interventionist" art: ie., where would-be situationists exposed a social ritual, relational aestheticians would merely sign it. Where is the radical middle ground: by participating, a social ritual is not exposed, embraced, nor examined: it is reversed permanently?

OJ: birth of the contemporary scene

2010-09-12T22:02:00.000-04:00

CLAIM:
The episteme of security, or, if you like, "certain guilt", did not begin with 9/11: it began with the OJ Simpson trial.
The social certainty of OJ Simpson's guilt at the hands of an inept judge and jury is the dream of security: That guilt is pronounced long before the trial, before even the crime itself.
In this way, OJ is the symbol for our age: the possibility of a sublime guilt, of criminal noumena circling time amemorial.

The elixir of longevity, the Lyre of Orpheus, and hardware

2010-09-06T20:05:00.000-04:00

CLAIM:

Digital technology is at the edge of the precipice of greed-driven quackery, that is, alchemy. It is not that science has no sense of its own shameful history, but that those who own science cannot look behind when they only search for gold ahead. The captains of history will steer the Titanic into an iceberg for every Titanic and for every iceberg.

Submitted for your intuition

2010-09-06T19:59:00.000-04:00

The difference between now and then is that when people spoke of finality before, nobody believed them.

The violence in Looney Tunes: death as a end is artless.

Seeing swimming pools from a plane shortly before landing.

Marxism, like psychoanalysis, is just adherence to stoicism.

Is blaming Darwin for Lamarck a pathology?

The nineties: disillusioned on someone else's behalf?

"Espere"

2010-08-20T17:17:00.000-04:00

CLAIM:
To paraphrase the great debater, Gilles Duceppe: I am lucky, because I already know I am not right. Everybody else is wrong, too, they just don't know it yet.

On sentimentality, irrationality and self-ishness

2010-07-25T22:51:00.000-04:00

SOURCE:
Anwyn Crawford via Carl Wilson, on, admittedly, other things. I don't want this post to cast aspersions on their very good work; I just had a question.
QUESTION:
Is it possible to talk about a particular irrationality without succumbing to the (admittedly very, very tempting) anecdotal? Can we talk about feelings without talking about our "own" feelings?
Moreover, are feelings irrational, or are they just falling outside of the Western doctrine of capital-R Rationalism?

Icarean Postscript

2010-07-20T16:43:00.000-04:00

CLAIM:
Through reason, as knowing, and only in this way, we separate ourselves from reality by allowing meaning to abscond with the truth.

Icarean Revision

2010-07-19T21:55:00.000-04:00

QUESTION:
Is it possible that the moral of the myth of Icarus is not, ""Do not fly too close to the sun", but "You cannot escape your self by invention"?
Is this not also true of everything that is real: we cannot escape the real by inventing it? This could function as a response to Husserl, when he asks: "Can reason and that-which-is be separated, where reason, as knowing, determines what is?"
That is to say, if we reverse the proposition: can reason and that-which-is be separated, where that-which-is, as being, determines what is?

Five Short Claims and One Good Question

2010-06-08T22:10:00.000-04:00

CLAIM:
We only have God's word that God has not obscured the meaning of God's word.

CLAIM:
The past is written on people and objects. It doesn't literally exist; it used to exist, and now functions as a story about prior existence.

CLAIM:
Everybody hates Descartes!

CLAIM:
The average, that is: commonplace, notion of irony does not actually include irony.

CLAIM:
Empiricism is as follows: I have seen it; whether or not it is real is a matter for phenomenology (what I want it to be) or ontology (it "is" whether or not it is true or false).

QUESTION:
Has any nuclear physicist ever been accused of overthinking it, and through that overthinking ruining the joy of nuclear physics?

What is this?

2010-05-26T12:31:00.001-04:00

CLAIM:
Toronto is a culture of antagonism between cars and bicycles. You can google this.
The recent Micheal Bryant verdict and related fallout send the following message to either side, that is: "You will not radicalize the thing for yourself, therefore, I will radicalize the thing for you by turning it into politics, absolutely."
However, what if we are to resist politics?
Or, is it that we live in a state of political determinism, that is, we are always already politicized, and that the truth flares up in an irruption of the real, that the face of antagonism shows itself given half a chance? The question then is, "how antagonized do we have to be before we radicalize"?
Surely, that was the question before. Now, and I mean now in the sense of immediately, politics works for itself, it is an aesthetic. Possibly, this is the lateness of the Frankfurt School: they recognized a politicized aesthetics, while under their noses, politics was aestheticizing, emptying out in the worst sense of a Kantian aesthetics. Kennedy achieves this, building on Stalin, a politics that is its sole aegis.
Like art for art's sake, politics takes whatever materials and turns them into politics. The political object transcends its parts, transcends the subject, into anecdotal purity: an endless series of violent tautologies, clashing, erasing human experience with human experience (because human experience serves only to delete itself with opposing samenesses), a sort of juridical compression.
This is precisely an unconscious conspiracy, or if you like, a conspiracy of the unconscious: "the object must be the object I think it is." Moreover, this conspiracy marks all other conspiracies as narrative, and therefore pseudo.
This is the reverse of claims to objectivity, that is, "I know there is a real, I have met it" (Baudrillard): now, it is "I know this is not real, I am watching it." This may also be expressed thusly: "I know this is not real, I am writing it", the internet variation.
Thusly, the first conspiracy, relying on "I have met it", lashes out with political determinism: "Everything is politics", as though some ideal form of politics may free human activity from politics by virtue of righteousness and victory.
But what of the de-politicized act? An act freed from politics, that continues through political upheaval, that quietly tells itself that it has nothing to do with it? The political may demand, "ah, but this is also politics", but again, this is a tautology. The de-politicized act knows that acting outside of politics, a sort of atheism, proves that the political tautology of "everything is politics" is an epistemological trick that only applies if one agrees with it.
Revolution for the hell of it, indeed.
This non-verdict poses many problems, though not as many as a not-guilty would have posed; suffice to say, it is entirely possible that cyclists and drivers are rapidly being drafted into a war they might not agree with, a war that doesn't have to happen, a war written by a set of zealots, a set of maniacs with political ideals. Remember, political ideals are, by nature, empty: this is the will to power manifest under the aegis of infrastructure- legislation turned aesthet/ethic.
The value of human lives given value for something that is, ultimately, indifferent.

Appendix to The Horror

2010-05-15T10:20:00.000-04:00

IN THE FUTURE, PERHAPS:
People may look back at this point in history (or non-history, given the doctrine of the new that surrounds the virtual) and apprehend the popularity of Facebook as we explain picture windows.

The Horror: Facebook

2010-05-14T14:09:00.000-04:00

CLAIM:
Facebook, the site of civic engagement for now on the internet (I say for now because it is simply the current in a line of like-mided sites- dating sites without much dating, perhaps)- is rapidly becoming the imperium of behavioural conformity. I say this with all due worry; this is not conformity in the "but a t-shirt with a skull on it" sense, but in the very real, very worrisome sense, that of Western fascism, perhaps (and I will remind everybody that fascism is nearly always a slippery slope of consent).
But this is not the sole horror that I can pin to Facebook. More terrifying is the mode of labour/immaterial consumption at play here, oddly reminiscent of Hal Hartley's film The Girl From Monday, in which people act as signs devouring signs, a sort of interpersonal ourobourous, a full negation of civic engagement outside of the virtual.
In this way, all physical deed is linked to its virtualization, like the Orange in Tron (or Stan in a recent episode of South Park)- that is, I act so that I may digitize the act, the endless generation of a new representamen so that I may co-exist with the digital by filling it. But here, it is not temporally limited; the past continues, catalogued, re-desirable (an emboldened nostalgia?).
Remember when I was yammering about the Bloodbath of Absolute Recall?
Surely that's scarier than Facebook atomizing tour published identity all over binary tarnation?

Roger Ebert, Super Mario, and fun is trying to kill you

2010-04-28T12:22:00.000-04:00

CLAIM:
Carl Wilson's response to Roger Ebert is apt; however, I have to throw in my two cents. Video Games may be the only form of "fun" that admits the truth: fun is actively trying to kill you. Look at in terms of Super Mario Bros.: Mario basically wakes up, leaves the house, and is attacked by explosive turtles, carniverous plants, and psychotic mushrooms. You are Mario; the game is trying to kill you. Constantly.
Think of fun in terms of Lady Gaga: the music is cheaply produced, only catchy in that it is tenacious, she cannot sing (a Gaga single is practically an advertisement for AutoTune), her only talent is outrageous outfits (which may not be her talent)- this is simultaneously punk's utopia and distopia, a commercial product that does not privilege any talent whatsoever, but paradoxically privileges a double-ironic (that is, turns away and then toward) material/immaterial fetishism. Lady Gaga is not the product of dada; she is the product of Bret Michaels devouring dada because it looks fun. Fun is C'Thulhu. Fun hates you, fun wants to eat you, fun wants you to die. Worst of all, you want to have fun.
Well, actually, C'Thulhu is immaterial production- in the case of video games, specifically death, actively death, in the same way as action or horror movies, gangsta rap, death metal, Verdi's La Traviata, and so forth- fun is also the immersive passivity of the internet on Facebook, which I have argued elsewhere is also death.
Part of the way in which video games could be viewed as art-as-resistance is to consider that fun/enjoyment has been completely fetishized in order to sell post-industrial work. And that fun, in the vein of Lady Gaga (now that I am trapped in the example) is like false-fun propaganda- the sort of excessive partying that Funkadelic was possibly warning us about when they demanded that they be given the funk (it's potent stuff).
All fun does is appear spontaneous (like punk, which was too naive to realize the creative labour apocalypse it suggested), perpetuating an "excessive present"- similar to Compagnon's argument that "progress has no other meaning than to make progress possible".
This is the "fun myth"- that fun is somehow making your own fun, and not that you are being duped into just making more fun. By conflating fun and enjoyment, enjoyment has become impossible, as the quest for fun, the work that goes into fun, negates enjoyment, tells you that the process of fun is a form of enjoyment and not hideous labour.
And this is where video games come into play, as art- they bear the device of labour-to-enjoyment via the threat of death. Sure, it's only virtual death, but any death is terrifying and bad; even the ironic death of digital homi-and sui-cides. The omnipresent thanos of Super Mario Bros., for instance, sends Mario back to an arbitrary past; that is, the recurring present is a series of deaths. The excessive present is not erotic, it is murder.
The process is unbearable, and the reward is ludicrous; in a way, it is not fun at all- but the relief is immeasurable. The video game is, to borrow Tristan Tzara, "a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action".

Originary Loss

2010-04-15T19:10:00.001-04:00

QUESTION:
If we were to imagine a time machine at the beginning of time, what would the occupants of the time machine see if they looked behind them? Time is not an LP. The needle is not chasing us, sending our vibrations into an amplifier.
This is not to say, however, that there is no beginning, but that the beginning, from an epistemological standpoint, is not unknowable but cannot be found. The beginning is always a priori; there is no experience of the beginning that is not attached to a beginning that precedes it. For instance, a time traveller at the beginning of time would experience the beginning of time after the beginning of their life. The experience of the beginning, then, would be out of order.
So, what, then, to make of the beginning? Can the origin happen at any point, or does the very notion of the beginning point to a linear process? Is the origin lost in happening? Is originary loss what we lock ourselves in combat with by designing history?

Fractal Belief

2010-04-06T15:08:00.000-04:00

CLAIM:
Part of capitalism's victory, the so-called "End Of History", is that capitalism no longer requires that anyone believe anything; that is, a sort of decentred agnosticism. Science, religion are only superficially at odds- the notion of tolerant coexistence enforces a mutability; none of these things is any more valid than any other, and as such, there is no truth.
With an absentee truth, there is also no non-truth: lies, myth and fantasy are no more true than law, objective experience or reason. Cinstant flux, perpetual desire, a world of epistemological impossibility. Radical syncretism.
The beginning of this is capitalism's loss of belief; simply put, the belief was that communism was wrong. With this fully proven, all that is left is the Heideggerrian ethical maxim: "Keep going!"
The plethora of purchasable communism is proof of that lack of belief: one may buy the vanquished former foe. One may, in fact, buy into any belief in order to maintain this entropy of individual identity; even conformity is exalted as a form of acceptable individuality.
Radical syncretism- everything is true, everything is false, it is just a matter of perspective. Even relativism cannot withstand the onslaught of hyperplurality.

Generation Gap: No Longer Comprehensible

2010-04-05T14:20:00.000-04:00

CLAIM:
The notion of "youth in revolt"- dead since the sixties, to be sure- has now become absolutely unknowable; the youth culture of today seeks the canonization of the past, and the canon wraps itself in today, and both sides freely admit it.
What has happened is a lot like the shift between oral and written cultures, and as such, musical historicists should narrow their eyes and locate the shift in order to determine its value.

Desire is entirely stupid

2010-03-28T11:15:00.000-04:00

OBSERVATION:
Now that I find equilibrium in my life, I occasionally recall other time, when there was giddy disequilibrium, which I understand now as desire. When I have something, I no longer want it- I no longer need to want it, because it is mine.
How ludicrous!
Desire is precisely this stupid; the want to want. An obsession with absence, with what is not there, endlessly seeking out empty space only to fill it (but this only reveals new empty spaces).
Thus, all replacement does is generate the replaceable. Or, as the birds fly south, all they find is that there is more south.

Suffocating Purgatory

2010-03-09T14:14:00.000-05:00

Change resists the subject; an event simply will not occur. Psychoanalysis... has failed to elaborate a concept of the world as much more than a vaguely specified reality to which we must learn to "adapt". To do so would mean recognizing that the subject's need to project himself on the world is not entirely necessary... the world will always resist embodying our anxieties, or our desires, but we are also in it independently of our need to master it.
- Leo Bersani

CLAIM:
The problem of the real is one of description. The real continues, indifferent. It will not be more real by description, and all description, sadly, is not the real it is describing (however, the description is also real). The cruelty of this is the simplicity of objects; real, still identically real no matter how much we examine them.
It is only subjective reality that bears description. I'm not saying that science is wasting its time; only that it will not make objective
reality more real than it already, painfully, is.
Subjective reality becoming more real, however, is the interesting proposition. It is objectively true that there is a subjective reality, part of which psychology tirelessly tries to drag, kicking and screaming, out of subjectivity and into objectivity.
However, all this accomplishes is to uncover more objective reality, and still more mercurial subjective reality, which can only be expressed and never described. Objective reality and subjective reality never touch. Objective truth only exists in objectivity and subjective reality subjectively.
The objective resists the subjective while the subjective forces itself into objecthood. In this way, the subjective looks to the objective, and screams: "Embody!"

A Problematic Approach To The Cinema

2010-03-05T14:40:00.000-05:00

CLAIM:
Film and art are two lovers who cannot stand one another's company. Film desires art yet reviles its pretensions, the very subject of art; simultaneously, art devours film's sumptuous hybridity and arresting visual immediacy, but loathes its vacuousness. This is a problem. For when a film attempts to deal with art, we end up with Anthony Quinn playing Paul Gauguin, and when artists attempt to deal with film, we only take the surface- the material film, but none of the messy bits from elsewhere that film has looted (literature, theatre, painting, and photography- which is not to say there are not paintings or photographs dealing directly with film, but that there are no photographs that deal with film as a prose-theatrical painterly series of photographic images).

Rather than discuss a single artist or filmmaker, I am electing here to discuss the tangential aspects of my fascination with an art language that deals with film, that is, to define -briefly- my terms for such an art language (setting aside the obvious arrogance of an artist claiming to set terms for an "art language"). I am going to explore what exactly film without film implies for artists and for filmmakers.

Let's unpack the phrase "prose-theatrical painterly series of photographic images". Firstly, film in general is a photographic medium used to tell stories- and the link to prose cannot be denied, given how many films are adaptations of novels or short stories. As for the theatre, film employs the tools of the theatre- actors, stages, props, scripts et al- and to top it all off, is typically shown in "movie theatres", or, at the very least, so-called "home theatre systems". The claim to the painterly will, no doubt, be the most contested claim here. However, most establishing shots can easily be traced to a collective consciousness shaped in whole or in part to the globally invasive rennaissance period of painting and the subtler but equally conquering Dutch Masters and their landscapes. These two periods of painting wrote a visual language for composition so insidious and fascinating that Western painters spent an entire century (the 20th) attempting, in vain, to subvert it. And this is the language of Directors of Photography- they speak of depth of field, of chiaroscuro, of line and so on. Simply put, the language of painting comes first, even before our eyes (which sought to capture natural beauty that could match a painting, and which now seek establishing shots, if not entire scenes along with the rest of our senses) 1.

Thus, art is already always there in film. This is easy to agree to; this is Barthes' studium, "the order of liking, not of loving" (Barthes, 27). That is, all of what I just described, and the statement that art is already always there in film, is obvious. It does little to describe the point at which film exits art, the point at which art is burst open and film comes out, and we arrive at films containing art and yet are clearly not art. Adam Sandler movies are a good example of this process. Billy Madison is not art, nor does it want to be art. A case could be made, but "Adam Sandler movie", with one exception 2, categorically does not re-enter art. Film, then, has its own punctum; not merely a hole or punctuation, but a shock- "revealed only after the fact" (Barthes, 53). The first order of punctum in film is that it is not art; nor is it prose, theatre, photography or painting. This is fundamentally distracting because it ought to be any one or all of those things. The first response, by artists, to film, is to locate where it is one of those things and magnify that objectual presence in the subjective space that film provides; to point to the photograph and yell, "Here!" But this is not sufficient. We know that the photograph, the composition, the word and the rehearsed gesture are there. The second- and crucial- order of punctum in film is the incessant motion of all of these things occurring at once, inseparably. We only distrust the film when we notice one of the elements stray from the others; a poorly written line acted badly, forcing us to observe an awkwardly moving photograph. Or perfectly fine acting and dialogue inside of an ill-concieved shot: even worse! We are witnessing a play, and there is no image.
However, these excruciating moments are merely us remembering that we are watching a film. The film's goal is always to make sure we never accept that we are watching an Adam Sandler movie; of course, a large part of this is willingness to not accept this fact, and allow it to hold our attention hostage. Any weakness the film shows is purely our sense of filmic strength. Even if the film is bad, we may allow it to dominate our senses as per our contract with it.

When film re-punctures art, this contract is not brought with it. Cindy Sherman's film stills, Douglas Gordon's miniature of the staircase from Psycho, Kelly Mark's Horroridor- all of these leave the act of watching a movie behind as though the contents of the film was of any importance to the act of watching. Perhaps they may vie for our attention when choosing what to watch, but certainly, once we have watched, the contents no longer count 3.
This brings us to another problem: film as film. The divide between punctum and studium, Ranciere reminds us, is one of potential; "the image as raw, material presence and the image as discourse encoding a history" (Ranciere 11). In film, this discourse is enacted by the audience, and includes the "raw, material presence"- the punctum and studium collapse into one another, film collapses into film, creating the mystery of cinema- the cinema is a "little theatrical machine that manufactures analogy" (Ranciere 57), to misappropriate Godard's sense of both mystery and cinema. This is the struggle of the structuralist filmmakers; a cinema that is the cinematic apparatus. Again, the movies are left out, but the surface of the film is brought back into art.
The surface and the contents cannot be intertwined as one without retaining their natural combination: movies. One must be left out for there to be art, it seems. Surely, the logical solution is to leave one out. I propose that the screen has no place in art about film. The screen remains out of fear located in the moving image, that the moving image will "provide that complete illusion of life" (Bazin 20), the myth that drives special effects-driven action spectacle and austere, film-with-whatever's-available realism alike. It is precisely the screen artists are afraid to lose and which draws them back into the crowd of filmmakers 4. The direction to take is clear: to remove the objects from the film and from the screen, and rearrange them as we are familiar with them onscreen- in motion. Note that the objects and the contents are two separate entities here, and that the subject we give the objects is a floating entity, not outside of our grasp, but for the sake of preserving the cinematic experience, mythologically beyond it.

The mythology of the subject is the mythology proposed by the object: realism. Either overtly asserted or entirely fabricated, this is the root of the cinema (Bazin, 21). We must preserve this mythology in order to remind ourselves of the movies, the site of the measurement of realism. Reminding ourselves of the film surface only leads to more realism: the image is on a surface (it is not- it is on multiple surfaces, and is no longer an image, but images). Likewise, the screen: the realism is that the screen is full (it is not- science tells us that the screen is empty some half of the time we are looking at it, but that our eyes cannot tell, or choose not to tell our brain, at any rate).
Time and space are key, such that motion is of the utmost importance. Either the work must move around the viewer or the viewer must move around the work. And it must not be a theatre: it must be the contents of the theatre, the contents of the cinema, freed from the theatre/cinema, and allowed to settle back into art, back through the puncture out that film creates.
And, like Orpheus upon leaving the underworld, art must not look back to see if film is following behind.

Notes
1. This is steps before some kind of hyperreality occurs, where we are in a film of a film- it is how we excite ourselves to our otherwise relentless and cruelly mundane surroundings, how we energize the cyclical drudgery of being in one place over and over, or in a place when we would rather be at home- a bus ride becomes the title sequence to a film about work or shopping, an interlude between hyperrealities, likely both more and less honest than those hyperrealities).

2. PT Anderson's Punch Drunk Love.

3. One should not make the mistake of assuming that I am saying the content of a film is not important. It is more that the content logically follows watching (not merely viewing).

4. And one should especially not make the mistake of assuming that I detest the crowd of filmmakers!

Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida.
1981, Hill and Wang. USA.

Bazin, Andre. What Is Cinema?
1967, University of California Press. Berkeley, California.

Ranciere, Jacques. The Future of the Image.
2007, Verso. Brooklyn, NY.

Suffocating Purgatories, part two

2010-03-05T14:15:00.000-05:00

CLAIM:
Social networking is almost a lie, in name: more accurately, it serves as living death, as I have insisted up to this point. Acting-out coincides with recording, and thus every action has its copy upon being acted.
Christian Metz talks about film viewership as a series of withdrawals. On the internet (which is television and so is also film) the triple withdrawal is disguised as fetish; we disavow the lack of presence but -unlike a fetish- the diavowal is incomplete; the scopic realm is undercut by participation and the moment of penetration is caught in a perpetual reveal.
This presents a twist on what I consider to be the root of the problem of agnosticism; that is, that an epistemological agnosticism ("we cannot know if there is or is not a God") asks the wrong question of faith, spinning it into an infinite regress where none is necessary except to preserve the fixity of not knowing; that is, "I solely believe that I do not know what to believe," often coupled with a secondary qualification, which is that "I do believe certain things provided that I agree with this method of proof for whatever reason". On the other hand, an ontological agnosticism (roughly: "we cannot know being apart from knowing, that is, knowing is a state of being", or something to that effect) is argued by the aforementioned withdrawals: "I know that this is no longer, because it is recorded, and now it is something else."
In this way, any record of God is no longer God. That is, the world, the known universe, religious texts ("the word of God") further reduce the possibility of God by making a perfect copy in a form under a new name. This is the impossibility of IRL- all of our concentration is focused on these copies, which are real, and the original is whittled away by its incapability of resembling the copy that proves its veracity. This slippery and temporal veracity fades as the object leaves its trace behind.

The Original

2010-02-15T19:01:00.001-05:00

CLAIM:
Objective reality does exist- it is just that the limitations of objectivity are false.
By way of example, the internet is objectively real. Simulations are also real: they exist. The truth of simulation is the tragedy of the modern. That is, that the original is not the apex of authenticity.
In the movie Moon, Sam Rockwell despairs to learn that he is not the first, not the original, not the only; however, the triumph is to act collectively, to recover from the absence of his own individuality.
But the individuality here is not-yourself; what is Sam Rockwell not the same as? That is the question of a typical individualism. This is also the limit of typical objectivity; it falls apart the second it is the same as itself, or the same as anything else, for that matter. Absolute difference, bearing no resemblance even to itself- which is impossible.
There never was an original. The burden of origin is absent, illusory, impossible. An objective original is out of our grasp. Because we recorded something at some time, even in oral cultures, there cannot be an original in the ourest sense of the word. This is the collapse of the original- once it is recorded, the origin is lost, the moment within the origin is trapped in time. That is, space trapped in time. The origin can never be traced- not without an infinite regression.
Nor would we want to find the original, ever- we would see and lose ourselves in resemblance. This does not get in the way of an inescapable objective reality. In fact, it protects objective reality from being apprehended within itself, that is, by its subjects, which would include us.

I'm mad as hell, and I Kant take it any more

2010-02-10T13:47:00.001-05:00

CLAIM:
It is our misfortune that Kant remains fundamental.

The Big Bang

2010-02-10T13:43:00.001-05:00

CLAIM:
It is not that the universe is spreading apart; it is that space itself- and space is nothing, which is the essence of everything and the goal of all existence (to no longer exist), space itself, nothing, is getting bigger.

Virtual Celebrity

2010-02-03T18:15:00.000-05:00

CLAIM:
When we compare The Jonas Brothers or Taylor Swift to pop music, specifically top 40 pop music of the past, an important distinction has to be made: that is, what is being sold. Music is not being sold, because people no longer buy records. It is the stars themselves. The celebrity industry makes more money than the celebrities achievements could; in corporate business terms, the bottom line is to make money from celebrity news instead, the achievements only persisting to justify the stardom, which is preferable.
In this way, Taylor Swift's songs are closer to commercial jingles than to hit singles. On the radio, the jingle has to be better than the songs anyway: it is played hundreds of times more often Because the top 40 is no longer the site of competition (all of the music is owned by 4 companies), the songs themselves require little longevity, only to not be infuriating in innundation. They do not need to be good, either: only instantly recognizable and transferable (vis-a-vis, "Sleep Country Canada, Why Buy A Mattress Anywhere Else?" which has been a hit for decades).
Celebrity has become absolutely virtual: Warhol's Marilyn, floating, detached, a reference only to Marilyn, is the state of stardom; famous only for fame. What type of fame has nearly no bearing on the content of fame, as well: actors sing pop songs, pop stars appear in movies, none of it intentionally memorable or important. What is important is their being famous: on Entertainment Tonight, on TMZ, on Perez Hilton, in the pages of Us and People. This is the venue of celebrity. It is more important that Ke$ha wear a dress to the Grammys than sing a song; the song is merely the vehicle that justifies both the Grammys and her presence there. Hence the proliferation of awards shows; not to sell more records, but to keep the pages of the magazines full.
This is the moral of the film Avatar; it is not oil that is unobtanium, but the stardom. The excuse for celebrity is depleting and we need a new wild west to draw our celebrities from. No-one is authentic, no effort is required to obtain one's fifteen minutes of fame- we must dress someone up, throw them to the natives, and celebrate them as "real" (as Baudrillard said, "We have to go and retrieve a reality for ourselves where the bleeding is"), knowing that true celebrity is no more, and our star is merely wearing a costume.

POST SCRIPT- A KANTIAN COOL:
Cool died years ago. A time when the Stones stood opposed to Lawrence Welk, hip versus square, is an invisible memory, a well-hidden neurosis, now that the Stones have become Lawrence Welk. The scum and punks and thugs and freaks are welcome on Ed Sullivan, and moreso on on the plethora of Sullivans and Welks that exist today; there is no more hip, but not because cool was purchased, but because in purchasing it, it was no longer cool. It wasn't cool at the point money could have it any more than it was cool at the point that squares were able to comprehend it at all, let alone comprehend it as cool. In fact, cool vanished, went off the grid, as it were, the second the first person attempted to apprehend cool in order to dissect and analyze it. In this way, all theories of cool are incorrect, as medieval doctors were incorrect in trying to locate a person's soul in their corpse. The Conquest of Cool, The Rebel Sell, so on and so forth, all theories of what cool is and why it is cool- are tantamount to phrenology.

Haiti: Absolute Thinking Outside The Box?

2010-01-28T14:12:00.000-05:00

CLAIM:
Fully destroyed, Haiti is now the site of a radical rewrite. History is not happening. It is tossed aside and replaced by Harmony. Disaster is the miracle, catastrophe is nullified, obliterated, nonexistent. This is the victory of creativity. Tragedy is simply overwritten. Mistakes do not exist. Now, there is only opportunity. The triumph of the creative will. Where modernism's nihilism was destroy, postmodernism's nihilism is create. It is not empathy that stirs the world, but the chance to replace, to build and own, to return the event to zero/null.

Jurassic Net

2010-01-17T18:10:00.000-05:00

CLAIM:
The internet is already a sort of digital dinosaureum. Excepting the claim that there are not many fictional versions of the way the internet used to be floating around, the class system exemplified between facebook and myspace looks an awful lot like pitting the terrestrial fauna of the cretacious against that of the jurassic (respectively).
This sort of Darwin-Marx boil-up seems characteristic of so-called social networking sites; the barely-ten-years-ago friendster is the object of ridicule more often than it is remarked upon that it has been left (digitally) derelict.
Is the internet evolving? My answer would be no. It is constantly devolving- into a catalogue, into a phone, into a mailbox, into post-it notes, and so forth. And always, it is trapped within ancient bodies- televisions, typewriters, walkmen, phones. Virtuality is always virtual itself- not so virtual that we cannot make it new, always on the verge of virtual- graspable, then made virtual again- material, static, inert.
Does this keep the collapse at bay? In appearances, yes. We talk about speed and access, without ever worrying about the suddenness of all meaning colliding with itself as memory- the bloodbath of absolute recall- instead following the magnetic allure of "high definition" et al. into virtuality that is so close to full reality that it appears not to be virtual at all.
This is like a Tyrannosaurus Rex meeting an Allosaurus and remarking, "Hey, you're almost me," before either bites the other's esophagus out with rows of razor-sharp teeth. For me, the only difference is that in our relationship to virtuality, and especially high-definition virtuality, we neglect that virtuality precedes us, as the Allosaur came before T-Rex (of course, Rex wouldn't know that, either- which is sort of my point).
It's also possible that friendster, myspace, and facebook will all be revealed as hoaxes, a mass hysteria brought on by transcendental and Tron-inspired urges in a desperate attempt by the information society to prove its own nomenclative veracity to itself; and then, it will be observed that a McLuhanian sucker is born every minute.

Love and running

2010-01-08T08:38:00.000-05:00

CLAIM:
The most curious aspect of love is its capacity to consolidate desire- like running a marathon, a marriage's sole desire is to keep going, and if it loses sight of that goal, the muscles collapse and the runners appear to die. Of course, the collapse is never on the runner's mind while running. And that, too, is the case in this change of desire- the absence of previous desire is apparent, but this former desire is a mystery What was it? It is gone.
And this, in and of itself, is a good thing. The jealousies and voids of the old desire give way to a new void or set of voids, that is, kids, 25th anniversaries, etcetera- and jealousy fades behind the will to change, to hold, to not break the pace of running. Even the notion of the finish line is absent; only running. To stop is to no longer run. And that is to notbe in the marathon.
There is something tantric, here, too- to reach the end too quickly, to climax before your partner or climax too completely, to finish, is to miss the point entirely.
There is fatigue, yes, but it is not enough to seize the legs; and when it finally does, the jouissance of atrophy is to have the entire marriage occur within the body at once, the abolition of time, an explosion of recollection within the sense of the muscles past the virtuality of a task into the work itself. When else is work itself except after work?
This is why it is so difficult for the married to imagine, properly, the time before marriage. Prior to running, we train, we stretch- but these are not the memory of the marathon as-it-happens, any more than the unthought of the marathon is its completion. Perhaps what is so curious about love is not this capacity, but that love's name gives away that which is unthought in love- that is, love itself, the act of loving to be in love and not love's completion, and accepting this act apart from any finality.

The Mass of Banks

2009-12-28T11:14:00.000-05:00

QUESTION:
Is our obsession with skyscrapers related to the general theory of relativity? Does the mass of bank buildings slow time enough that we may have more than 24 hours in our day? How much bank building would it take, and how fast would they have to be moving?

In Search Of Lost Time

2009-12-23T11:26:00.000-05:00

CLAIM:
The Reminiscence Bump perfectly explains the state of the virtual culture, locked in infantile nostalgia. We live in a memorial world, a world that answers to Proust.

The Present

2009-12-23T08:33:00.000-05:00

CLAIM:
It has been observed, perhaps rhetorically, that we tend to think of the past or the future because the present is banal, possibly too banal to even register.
It is not that the present is banal. The narrative is the realm of banality.
Take, for instance, the film The Terminator.
Sarah Connor drops everything and is mercilessly chased by a killer robot for several days. Her entire life is reduced to one repetitive action, a singular and focused meaning, and all leisure time is eliminated. What could be more dull? It's not as though she would prefer to be chased by a killer robot. She spends the film trying to escape this banality, and the narrative ends.
If the characters within a narrative are trying to escape the banality of the narrative, we escape to this banality. Because the tiny and fast-moving present exhausts us, will not allow our mind to rest, forces us to make connections and make sense of nonsense like hunger, fatigue, restlessness, the discomfort of a sofa and so on.
Bored by all the excitement, all the feelings, all the sensations, we turn to merely defeating time because we don't have the energy to use it.

Mornings

2009-12-12T08:36:00.001-05:00

CLAIM:
The sun might as well be rising over nothing, leaving daytime behind it the same way one of us might leave litter.

The world ends before coffee

2009-12-11T13:09:00.001-05:00

BACKSTORY:
I was in Tim Horton's yesterday, and a guy came up behind me and asked the server, "Where's the line?" (There wasn't one.)
She said, "Wherever", and he looked perplexed.
-I turn and say, "Free will- it's a doozy."

CLAIM/CORRECTION:
It was not free will that flummoxed him. At first, I thought that being confronted with a moment of stasis, of non-choice, was his stumbling block.
But then, it occurred to me that what was happening was that he was faced with the task of starting the system again- that is, the lineup system before the two cash registers. Without an existing lineup, there was no indicator as to which cash register was more likely to be next, and even though this decision would be made for him, the anxiety of literally arriving to find that he was next in line was insurmountable.
It's terrible without the bureaucratic safety blanket. Some Tim Hortons have a barrier rope set up for this purpose, a miniature labyrinth that leads to the next available cash- the choice is made for you. Yet, without it, it looks like one must decide upon arrival, before one has had a chance to gather their wits, decide on their regular order, and check their pockets for change.
Of course, this Tim Hortons did not, leaving the perplexing mess of a bottom-up system; left to our own devices, what must we do, especially when others depend on us? After all, I just want to walk in, buy my coffee, and be done with it. That is all anyone behind me in the lineup wishes. But what if it is only after me that the lineup forms?
This, of course, was a question on this gentleman's mind- as the one forming the lineup, where should he start? Who must he wait for? And for how long?
This is no longer a question of merely deciding, but of deciding for everyone else. Even in a situation where the most one will suffer is momentary confusion and possible embarassment because they, themselves, the head of the line, did not know where to go, the naked machinery of the hive is certainly horrible. What does the first ant to arrive back at the colony think?
This is the first breath after a spell of hiccups- will this breath be correct? Will everything run smoothly after this? If not, what next?
One might then stop laughing, and marvel at the tiny eschatological breaks that we encounter on such a regular basis, that we ignore and move on without stopping ourselves to notice that the world stops, tilts, and nearly ends on a regular basis all around us, and that if it didn't matter, it might not do that. If moving on from the end of the world keeps it moving, what if we stop allowing it to end?

News

2009-12-05T09:48:00.000-05:00

CLAIM:
The only reported news that actually lives up to its own name would be traffic, and weather- besides being the only items in the news of any importance, and also besides the fact that they are the only items whose veracity can be tested (and therefore found to be of any value), traffic and weather are the only situations that change regularly enough that we could possibly mark them as "new" in an endless cycle.
Politics, crime, celebrities- all of this is only there to stall the inevitable: snow and traffic jams.

Science

2009-12-03T11:48:00.000-05:00

BACKSTORY:
I was chatting with a friend, and mentioned that I feel skeptical about the veracity of science. He said, "What about when you're on a plane? You don't feel so skeptical then, do you?"
I replied, "You've obviously never sat next to me on a plane".

CLAIM:
What I should have said is that science doesn't make the plane fly, it just gives us a fairly good explanation as to why it flies, which we then put some faith in, and stop worrying about the plane suddenly not flying.
But think about it this way.
If I were an ancient Egyptian, either traveling time or immortal, take your pick, I might believe that the plane is kept in the air by Ra. Before the flight, I would make a sacrifice to Ra, and upon landing, decide that the sacrifice had succeeded, pleased Ra, and in turn he kept the plane in the air.
We could view science in much the same way (though bloodless). Before going on the plane, I looked at the equation that explains why the plane will stay in the air, essentially offering these numbers to the math gods, and upon landing, found that these numbers worked out- essentially, the math gods were pleased with my offering.
Much like the offering to Ra, a number of years have passed since this invocation was first made, and as such it is now more or less traditional. In fact, a number of people have moved on to another mathematical "sect" (statistics) over the orthodox (physics); or just become blindly agnostic, fairly certain for no reason in particular that the plane will land safely.
In fact, this is my point: not that science requires faith (this is a banal and particularly obvious point that only serves during undergraduate imbibement debates), but that science itself is pagan, and as such, requires a skepticism most non-scientists seeking to appeal to science to not bring to it.

Tantalus

2009-12-01T21:12:00.001-05:00

QUESTION:
Is it possible that we always socially identify with Tantalus, thirsty, hungry, with the stone that landed us in the underworld in the first place hanging above our heads, waiting to crush us again but never delivering?

CLAIM:
It seems to me that when we believe that the case is Sisyphean instead, we are optimistically lying to ourselves.

Death In American Cinema

2009-12-01T08:49:00.000-05:00

CLAIM:
American cinema is mostly imitation snuff film. The assumption of the audience is an emotional bankruptcy, a people so fatigued from chasing various phantasms (success, authenticity) that they salivate for empty pathos, for being positioned in impossible grief, and that they want instant popshot access for death.
This gratuitous porno of lethal despair is ultimately the same as watching Bloodsport, only thoroughly dishonest. Bloodsport, at the very least, admits on every level (even the title!) that our gratification, as viewers, comes from violence and death.
A film like In The Bedroom, on the other hand, pretends, until the climax, to be above violence, tantalizing the viewer like a virtual lapdance. It is only at the point that the audience has had enough standoffs of whispered arguments with dish-smashing crescendoes that they are rewarded (for sitting through so much acting) with the murder they have paid to see- the middle class doctor in a pastoral seaside town, married to a teacher (this is ourselves), avenges the death of his aspiring architect son by shooting the uneducated, mullet-wearing, alcoholic wife beater (not only an abject other, but precisely the abject other we blame for, say, George W. Bush's presidency, the abject other that we blame for the Gulf War, rather than bankers with corporate interest in such an enterprise).
This is considered fantastic filmmaking.
And why not? If all American cinema is ultimately about the money shot of death, why not tantalize the audience with one truly satisfying death, a death that was demanded before they entered the theatre, before they were even presented with the plot?
Following this morbid line, any movie involving a cancer subplot is essentially high-class erotica.

Enjoyment

2009-11-24T22:49:00.001-05:00

CLAIM:
There is no state of pure enjoyment.
The thing that is "enjoyed" is mostly armour against that which is not enjoyed- precisely the miasma of unenjoyment the world is made up of; work environments, inappropriate lighting, horrific music, grating advertisements and so forth, all of which appears to be in the control of some elite that has transcended any form of enjoyment, and so none of this matters.
A conspiracy of bad taste.
This, while comforting and useful to try and rationalize contemporary architecture or what is to be found on the ground floor of most chain bookstores, is not true (well, not entirely). The reason why can be found within ourselves.
Because the locus of enjoyment is private, we say "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", but this is mere forgiveness for the unendurable bad taste of the world we find ourselves in, and the unenviable position of a democratized aesthetics. Beholders share, must come to meet halfway, and compromises are made. This is culture- that is, mass culture, the compromise of taste to tolerance.
Bearing this in mind, we see that beauty is not beheld at all, it is ugliness. Hideousness is in the eye of the beholder, and as such, a balance is always struck to present an agreed-upon grotesquerie.

Castration

2009-11-20T23:00:00.000-05:00

CLAIM:
In Lars Von Trier's Antichrist, the masculine and feminine sides of a psyche square off to the death. This is not in question. The question is, whose psyche is it we are watching?
If it is Charlotte Gainsbourg's, the film is a masterpiece of misogyny: masculine rationality reigns over chaos, the sadist reaffirms law, the rule of force is beyond challenge. A mother's grief is hysterical and it ends there.
More interesting is to consider Willem Dafoe the patient: rationality pulls him away from medicine, a competing logic; he's terrified of the bush, of birth, of acknowledging the womb, of lack, and most of all, of castration (both sides here are castrated). When the feminine side turns both onto objects of lack (with a clitoris, she was still a he) the masculine explodes with lethal fury; specifically, impotent violence: he is already without a phallus and without seed.
Pleasure is to blame for relinquishing control over the kingdom- the orgasm itself caused the death of the son, and in the give-and-take of psychic blame, it had to go (combine this with the witch imagery and you see the "gynocide" in the title of Gainsbourg's character's thesis work).
Moreover, this expulsion of pleasure os analagous (doubly) to the exile from the Garden of Eden- he cannot go back, his actions irreversible, but also she cannot return to his site, having been expelled. His entire enterprise in the film is a rejection of birthing; he kills all the babies- the stillborn deer, denying that the trees cry over the deaths of acorns, and this same rejection turns into a lurid embrace of death- again, the stillborn deer, the fox devouring itself, the unmurderable crow, his and her phalluses, the unmurderable crow, and, finally, Eve.
In the end, for all of his efforts to leave Eden (and Eve) behind, he cannot.
In the final sequence, women are seen everywhere as a homogeneous mass that surrounds him, faceless, in the roots of every tree, dividual.
The very psyche of mankind is what is wrong in the world, what does not fit, what is marked and what is not right.
Murderous, castratable, in competition with himself, man has no place in nature.

Also, smartphones

2009-11-19T18:49:00.001-05:00

CLAIM:
With my new Blackberry, I can make the game "Brick Buster" work, but nothing else. I can't a call, responding to text messages takes some involved cluster of minutes. It is as if I have been relegated, against (or more accurately, coaxed with a failsafe manipulation of) my will, into an unwanted second childhood- but not one of wonder and discovery, but one of helplessness and toyboxes.

This is the same nightmare the early automobile market faced when, demanding more cars than merely the Model T but lacking any real innovation in the automobile, drivers were presented with fins, chrome, a wide palette of colours and FM radios. And, lacking anywhere to go, the length of the highway was cluttered with proto-Taco Bells or giant models of dinosaurs and fruit.

No addresses, no destinations, nothing to venture or gain. Speeding to stand still. I have gotten to the front of the queue, traded in my tickets, and it was revealed that the ride was just a dead patch of grass.

Smartphones

2009-11-19T18:46:00.000-05:00

CLAIM:
Like always, I feel like an imbecile with whatever new interface. Why is any button where it is? Why is there a dial? Why is everything hidden? The more obscure, the cleverer the user feels; the more intuitive, the more the user is convinced that they are God.