High Mayhem, Saturday ~ Loud Objects

I attended the High Mayhem Emerging Arts Festival and witnessed some spectacular performances. Among the notable (only one will be truly noted, digitally) was the Loud Objects, a New York duo who literally built their input in front of the audience.

It went a bit like this: two gentlemen set up a standard transparency projector -- the one they used to use in science class -- and secured to it a transparent plastic panel. With only a single input, the gentlemen proceeded to practice a creator-surgery (the almighty god sort) on the panel and the input, which was hooked up to large speakers in front of the projection. Creator-surgery, the word I have (regretfully?) chosen to describe their work, was a sort of construction of sound by soldering wires to the input on one end and circuits laid onto the panel on the other; as they soldered different combinations, different frequencies of sound were manipulated through the wires and the circuits, ending up at the input and eventually experienced (sensorially) by the audience.

(During one hilarious moment that I won't recount, except here, in a super brief aside, a bug flew into some superglue, used to secure the circuits to panel, but miraculously escaped and became part of the performance. I believe I heard one man shout out, minutes after the now-averted disaster, "where's the bug?" Please understand that the similarity between circuits, which are commonly 6-pronged, and bugs is not lost to me: I'm calling for papers discussing it.)

As the show went on, the sound became more and more complex; a beat emerged, oscillating tweaks and twangs intertwined in movement variations, and the audiences' pulses raced in excitement. We (us, that audience - a necessary component, as pointed out by my dear friend Jesse (now undergoing a sort of reversal creator-surgery at the moment: his wisdom teeth are being pulled)) watched from our bleacher seats as we witnessed the construction of both the input/instrument and the sound; The sheer unpretentiousness of the construction and subsequent manipulation made the whole thing, shall we say, enlightening.

A really phenomenal performance.

Hans Schabus, SITE Santa Fe, and installation loneliness

SITE Santa Fe, the contemporary art space on Santa Fe's Railyard District, commissioned an Austrian artist named Hans Schabus to take over their entire building with his meditations on the desert. From the essay accompanying the exhibition:

In Deserted Conquest (2007) -- an installation commissioned by SITE Santa Fe and the artist's first solo museum exhibition in the United States -- Schabus stages a series of confrontations (permanence vs. mobility; the grid vs. spiral form; artificial vs. natural; among others) within the New Mexico landscape that questions our beliefs about the desert and the American West. The objects in this exhibition -- a deconstructed mobile home, two videos, collages, over 100 tons of dirt, and an assortment of "found" items -- not only embody the oppositions that Schabus sets up, but also speak abstractly to notions of history, mythology, and alienation.

-- From the Exhibition Essay, which fails to mention an author's name.

As a whole, I enjoyed the space very much. Schabus makes huge installations out of mobile homes and the walls of old buildings, using their weathered and dilapidated aesthetics in contrast to the whiteness of the gallery space. He accents this with Cabin Fever, an interesting wagon wheel chandelier holding some two dozen candles, continuously lit and allowed to drip onto the floor over time.


In addition to these installations, Schabus takes some video footage from Yeso, NM, juxtaposing the loud, oncoming train with the dead quiet of the now ghost town. It was a stunning video that really resonated the emptiness of Yeso's spaces and the power and beauty of an oncoming train. The piece is called East, West, South, North



The title installation, Deserted Conquest is something like 10 tons of dirt packed down into a room that has its title emblazoned on the wall in steel. I imagine the space changes over time as visitors explore the empty room that is literally just full of desert dirt.

But what was most interesting, however unintended, was the fact that I was almost alone in this room. That is to say, I was actually the only patron in the entire gallery when I viewed it, but I was not the only human being. As I walked into the building, I was greeted at the desk and immediately headed into the exhibition (it was Friday, which means that there is no admission fee). I was tailed by a young woman, probably in her early twenties, who was carrying a walkie-talkie and was dressed in the casual, dark toned uniform of a SITE employee. She told me to watch my head on a specific, slightly hidden piece. This was our last direct interaction; after that, she casually milled about in whatever vicinity I was in the museum.

Now, I understand this is her job, but I felt sorry for her because she was obviously uncomfortable walking around with me but without interacting with me, basically "keeping watch" over something that hardly needed watching-over. I ended up feeling strange because I was wandering in Schabus' purposeful emptiness, an expanse that, like our romantic notions of the desert journey, seems best suited for solo exploration. Happening upon the space at the right moment allowed me such a solitary experience that was constantly disrupted by the woman guarding me throughout my viewing of Schabus' work.

Ultimately, I came to associate her presence with that of a ghost. She would not follow directly behind me, but rather wander between the rooms quickly enough to not seem like I was under constant surveillance. I instead felt like I was always vaguely being followed by something that, upon turning around, was just disappearing behind a corner.

In the end, this added to the experience Schabus sets up in his recreation of the solitude and expanse of the desert, as the ghost town of Yeso came to embody the dirt covered floor, leaving only a wispy trace of life that is always just behind you but outside of reach, outside of language, and experiencing something wholly different than you are.

The Luxury of Time

I had a chance to drive from Santa Fe to Nederland, Colorado, over the weekend, making the trip up and back in two days.

(An aside: I remember what Deleuze said about the American journey vs. the French -- it's an interesting take on something (today) we wouldn't necessarily assume. The American journey is the journey into the smooth, an escape from striation.)

In preparation for the seven hour journey, I uploaded some podcasts into my ipod. Though I usually listen to music, this trip I found that for such long treks listening to conversations and lectures open up a different sort of intellectual stimulation that were more metaphysically enlightening. I had previously found some In Our Time podcasts and downloaded a couple. Now, I can't seem to download individual podcasts or archived ones. Strange.

An interesting thing about aural media in combination with driving is that there is an intermixing of disembodied philosophical speculation and the movement of one's body in space. The landscape coming down from the mountains of Colorado into New Mexico presents a vast scene that is simultaneously endless and yet free of a daunting blandness; trees and vistas poke out of the fluid, lapping waves of the ground. Such a beautiful expanse paired with the spark of philosophical banter made me realize the luxury of the moment. These moments are few due to the constant distractive jarring of our normal lives in the milieu.

It is quite an interesting place to be -- contextualized in nature around oneself yet encapsulated in a vehicle that moves quickly along the ground. A sort of hovering in the Umwelt. Though surrounded by very technology that facilitates this experience, one feels in tune with the phenomenological thread at the edge of consciousness, and perhaps reveals that plane in which the two merge and emerge into one another.

As we align ourselves into the openness, we streamline the intellectual rhizome as is bursts forth from our bodies in space: like releasing a ghosted line of fog as we go along, we insist on the creation of form through the mesh of spirit.

Blackle - Google and Color Inversion

From Jazzy (and Lizzy):

Blackle
(.com)

because inverted colors are more sustainable. and, occasionally, more interesting. the (.com) is the actual site.



Another trick that serves the same purpose but operates system-wide (mac os x wide) is:

ctrl + alt + apple + 8

that inverts the colors on mac os x. It isn't an extremely advanced trick, but if you're running low on battery life and/or care about saving whatever energy you can, try it out. just don't try it with blackle on, because then you're inverting the already inverted colors, which means that you're totally counteracting whatever small change you were enacting.

From Another Space

I am posting this older blog post that was the sole entry on my old blog Autotechnomy, dated Tuesday, September 26, 2006

* * *

Finesse -- Virilio and Dance

"To me, dance is an extraordinary thing, more extraordinary than most people usually think"

--Paul Virilio


I need to outline my vision for the body's way of 'computing' technology in an attempt to set it outside of reducibility to technology. This is what I call finesse, the subtle and graceful movements of the body that can move and flow like a dance with the earth. It is a form of transcendence from the errors and misfiring that the mind can have when overwhelmed. It is conscious meditation, it is flirting, it is sex. It is the pulse you pick up on when you listen to music and can hear nothing else, the vision of god above the clouds during a sunset. It is the beautiful articulation of what it means to be inside your own body and mind.

But is it nostalgia? Finesse is what nostalgia wants to recreate. I don't rely on memories anymore. I rely on the movement of the body forward, to the experience when you start to speak and everything you say is perfect and completely coherent and everyone walks away beaming at you. It is the moment when you bring everyone to the same page in a book and learn from each other. It is, and has always been, love.

* * *

and by love, I mean spirit

The Master Cleanse Failure

After approximately 36 hours of fasting, I had to break the fast. Failure is painful, but I have realized that my relationship with my body and with food is important and cannot merely be sidelined for an experimental fast. That is not a justification as much as it is a more a need for proper context when embarking on such a journey. I had jumped into the fast in an excited manner -- which is the way to do it on a certain level because it keeps your attitude about the fast positive -- but didn't consider that its the best part of the late summer harvest and that I wasn't actually mentally prepared to forgo food for 10 days.

I gave up early, but I ultimately have drawn an understanding of my limitations. The fast could potential be undertaken at a later point, when I've had time to think it through. Besides, the spirit is intricately intertwined with my relationship with food.

The Master Cleanse

I've just begun the Master Cleanse, a fasting detox-diet that we all have been thinking about for a while. You can check out the cleanse here for a more detailed account.

Essentially, the Master Cleanse is a fast in which the Master Cleanser drinks 6-12 glasses of lemonade every day, as well as some laxative tea and a saltwater cleanse interspersed. It should be clear why the Master Cleanse is also called the lemonade diet. But the lemonade isn't powers or crystals, rather we compose it from fresh squeezed lemons (or limes, which we are actually using also), grade B maple syrup, a dash of cayenne pepper, and distilled water. The lemonade tastes pretty good, especially when you're hungry like I am now.

With that overview over with, I have to say that I'm excited about the cleanse because it gives me a chance to really escape from the horrible things I do to my body on a daily basis (smoking, drinking, and generally living). I'm concentrating on myself and attempting to reach out to and embrace the spirit, which has recently come to represent a broad spectrum of vague beliefs that I hold while simultaneously standing for extremely nuanced and specific conceptions.

Sometimes blogging taps me into the spirit, as it has now. I'm not feeling very hungry. I expect the next several days to be more interesting and fruitful.


Update

I oscillate between hungry and not; I have already come to appreciate my previous relationship with food and the general freedom it allows me. Also, it strange how much of one's day is taken up by food and food-related activities; I'm having trouble finding things to fill my day, which also serves to take my mind off the fact that I'm actually quite hungry.

Guacamole

This is not a food blog.

The Necessities

Ripe Avocados (4)
Red Onions
Garlic
Cilantro
Limes
Salt

Creation

(The ingredients above are only the base mixture for whatever sort of guacamole variation. You could add cucumbers, chopped spinach, or sauteed bok choy to it too, but start with this base (and don't add sour cream).)

Cut the avocados, remove the skin and the huge seed, and place the green meat in a bowl. Chop up about a handful and a half of onions into tiny cubes and add. Dice the a clove of garlic (or two) as well as the cilantro -- I like about a closed fistful of cilantro because it really makes the flavor. Obviously, less can be used. Add the garlic and the cilantro. Get two limes, cut them in half, and juice them into the mixture (~1 lime for every 2 avocados). I usually scrape the inside pulp into the mixture with a small paring knife. Add a thin covering of salt to the greenish mixture, then stir it with a fork. Don't whip it. Eat with anything.

Salads, Intensities, Rhizomes

Quite simply, a Salad Recipe that I conjured on the spot and is good enough to write down "to remember."


The individuated parts:

Snow Peas
Snap Peas
Mung and Assorted Bean Sprouts
Baby Spinach
Red Onion
Blackberries (and some juice)
Gorgonzola Cheese
Balsamic Vinegar
Celery Tahini

The construction of the whole:

I cut up the peas and the onion, one part onion to two parts peas. I threw in some bean sprouts and at that moment some fresh blackberries arrived from my backyard. I added one part blackberries (more would be fine), and placed the salad in the empty bowl in which they were picked. I added a splash of balsamic vinegar on top, then shredded some gorgonzola on top (a pretty liberal amount as its a crucial flavor). Then a dab of celery tahini, topped with a big handful of baby spinach.

Toss lightly but thoroughly, and serve.

A thought on opening-up, intensities, positivities, creations

Baudrillard claims that desire does not come up in Foucault's work because its place is already occupied by power; thus, Deleuze and Lyotard's theories of the schizoid and libidinal are analogous to Foucault's power-systems -> they are rhizomes, openings-up, continuities, etc.

Isn't it interesting (though this is one of Baudrillard's critiques) that the three take up different themes in similar ways, as if suggesting that the intensities and rhizomatic structures of the earth are ideas that have been teased and teased until their tangents emerge, their connections light up, and their systems channel information to and fro continuously.

Blogs, Frustration, and a New Idea

I am attempting to engage with questions of sustainability, consumerism, and what I call new "techniques of existence" in the technoscientific age. What concerns me most is the co-optation of "green," "environmental," "sustainable," and so on by business. That isn't to say that I am not guilty of buying so-called green products, but the sort of ignorant consumption that is promoted by blogs in general is quite disturbing.

For instance: today, I was searching for hacks and diy projects related to electronics and technology in general; eventually, through several tangents of RAID kits and wandering in the dark as to the fundamentals of modification and hardware hacking in general, I came across a "green hacks blog". What the "hacks" suggested, however, amounted to a basic tips sheet on how we can change our consumption habits to be more sustainable. What the blogger clearly misses is his reliance on his current lifestyle. He fails to see that consumption itself is a blight.

Combining these two ideas: a blog/site that offers step by step ways to reduce consumption of resources and encourages the development of symbiotics in human/earthly life.

For example:

an electronic switch stepup that allows circuits in the home to be shut off entirely. this would allow devices that are constantly connected to electric outlets, such as televisions and appliances, to be cut off from power flow entirely. The reason for this is that televisions and appliances have circuits that constantly use energy even when not on. So, besides computers and clocks and whatever else needs a bit of constant electricity, the rest of the power in the home could be totally shut down.

Maybe I'll get some more ideas later.

New Direction

Having completed my senior thesis, "Cyborgs, Posthumans, and New Techniques of Existence in the Age of Technoscience," I have found that I have less time than ever before. But soon that will all change, and I hope to expand this blog from a notebook into something more interesting and fruitful.

As the title of this blog still conveniently suggests, knowledge remains a large intellectual concern in my own thought processes; currently, I am interested in the ways in which we learn and experience the world through mediated sources as opposed to our sensorial being in the world.

My first question arises from differing practices of understanding and learning. An example comes to mind from my own life: I am trying to learn several foreign languages at the moment, as well as a computer-based language. For the cultural-linguistic languages, which are French and German (simultaneously!, or at least I'm making an attempt based on another assumption that I won't detail here), I have acquired a program called The Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone is supposed to be a great, visually-oriented program that immerses the user in the language without "teaching" it in the strict sense. There are, for example, no conjugation charts or proper grammatical lessons that I have found thus far.

I still can't speak French or German, but my understanding of basic vocabulary and some elementary verbs has improved -- and improved far better than reading a beginners book on the language. The glaringly obvious problem with the program is that the immersion is one sided and digital, not heterogeneous and "actual". This is not so much a complaint as an observation -- I can't very well go to France or Germany at the moment, I understand that I'll need more language classes later, and so the program actually becomes the most progressive step toward these future endeavors because I'll have some basic understandings but no strictly formal education.

The idea here, and the one I find the most interesting, is the becoming-childlike that the language program has sparked within me; I hold to the belief that the ever-wide eyes of the child occur because it is always amazing at the surroundings and stimuli its taking in. The trick, for me, is to become-childlike in any endeavor, but with the abilities and sensibilities of someone much older. (I'm reminded of the film "Unknown White Male" at this moment that, though perhaps a hoax and surely a bit overdone, brings up this idea nicely.)

My experience with the program speaks to my understanding of experience-in-the-world as extremely important, but also the advantage of knowledge/memory (in this case, the program and its presentation of a language to be learned) that technology enables us.

Delayed

As soon as my thesis is done, I have BIG plans for this space. I just want to jot down some ideas for now.


Posthuman(ism) and:

ornithology
conchology
the beach

Dynamic flash site:

humanism/antihumanism/posthumanism
the cyborg
the posthuman
the human outline and potential updates to her form
3x3 navigation boxes via magnetic central launching node

The website is envisioned as a space for continually developing posthumanist notions (critically). Academic rigor and animated representation and incorporation included.

Simulation/Madness

"The first Gulf War was the first "live" war. World War Two was a world war in space. It spread from Europe to Japan, to the Soviet Union, etc. World War Two was quite different from World War One which was geographically limited to Europe. But in the case of the Gulf War, we are dealing with a war which is extremely local in space, but global in time, since it is the first "live" war. And to those, like my friend Baudrillard, who say that this war did not actually occur, I reply: this war may not have occurred in the actual global space, but it did occur in global time. And this thans to CNN and The Pentagon. This is a new form of war, and all future wares, all future accidents will be live wars and live accidents.
(Wilson: How will this removal affect people?)
Firstly, a de-realization, the accident of the real. It's not one, two, hundreds or thousands of people who are being killed, but the whole reality itself. In a way, everybody is wounded from the wound of the real. This phenomenon is similar to madness. The mad person is wounded by his or her distorted relationship to the real. Imagine that all of a sudden I am convinced that I am Napoleon: I am no longer Virilio, but Napoleon. My reality is wounded. Virtual reality leads to a similar de-realization. However, it no longer works only at the scale of individuals, as in madness, but at the scale of the world.

By the way, this might sound like drama, but it is not the end of the world: it is both sad and happy, nasty and kind. It is a lot of contradictory things at the same time. And it is complex."

--Virilio, Cyberwar, God and Television: An Interview with Paul Virilio
Conducted by Louise Wilson, from Digital Delerium


Virilio's comparison of madness with simulation is really interesting because if we've been taught as liberal academics to treat madness as an interesting singularity in personality, simulation must be able to divulge similarly interesting points. Of course, we may not seek out madness, but we do seem to seek out simulation, at least on some level. Taking, for example, Massive-Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), the real player can become Napoleon consciously and willingly, interact with others as Napoleon. But perhaps the previous example is "active" simulation, whereas something like television and CNN is "passive" simulation because one does not choose the way in which it overtakes the body.

Beginning Life on the Screen

I've just begun Sherry Turkle's book Life on the Screen: Identity and the Age of the Internet, finish the introduction and the first chapter. Turkle begins her book, which is mostly about MUD-based interactions (think self-designable chatrooms, for now), with an interesting distinction between Modernist and Postmodernist of computer technology. The modernist defines the computer in the sense of an enlarged, more powerful calculator, capable of "computation" in the very literal sense. Postmodernist views, which she obviously prefers and embraces for the book thus far, see computer technology and the internet as an embodiment of itself; computers decentralize and fragment themselves, link (or hyperlink) between objects in infinite number of ways, and allow individual or unique creations in both hardware configurations and representation of the self (MUD chat rooms are her example).

Briefly summarizing the latter, a user can enter a chatroom and become who they want to be. They can become someone of a different gender, sexual orientation, cultural background, etc. and design a world and a simulated life around this persona that they've chosen to adopt. She asserts that some of these users feel more Real in their simulated environment, as if they've final constructed the life they were always meant to have had. Turkle moves on to lay out a history of computer-culture before the internet, while maintaining her modernist/postmodernist binary. What becomes most interesting for me is when she moves into the subsection "objects-to-think-with"...

Computers have become objects of orientation, of remembering, and of life processing. Much like what Sontag says of the photograph at a wedding re-membering the experience, the computer creates a tension between the user and their input and the way it is re-received. But, like photographs, they have become a part of remembrance, so much that we can often rely on photographs (now digital) to recall an event or experience. (Virilio talks about this too, in The Information Bomb in a totally different light). Further than that, like the way certain knowledges are appropriated by the masses and become a part of the way we think about the world (such as Freudian Slips or Dream Analysis from Freud), computers shape ours:

"Today, life on the computer screen carries theory. Here is how it happens. People decide that they want to buy an easy-to-use computer. They are attracted by a consumer product -- say, a computer with a Macintosh-style interface [note, Turkle is writing 11 years ago]. They think they are getting an instrumentally useful product, and there is little question that they are. But now it is in their home and they interact with it every day. And it turns out they are also getting an object that teaches them a new way of thinking and encourages them to develop new expectations about the kinds of relationships they and their children will have with machines. People decide that they want to interact with others on a computer network. They get an account on a commercial service. They think that this will provide them with new access to people and information, and of course it does. But it does more. When they log on, they may find themselves playing multiple roles, they may find themselves playing characters of the opposite sex. In this way they are swept up by the experiences that enable them to explore previously unexamined aspects of their sexuality or that challenge their ideas about a unitary self."

-- Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity and the Age of the Internet

...
My apologies for the vague and overlong summary. My purpose was to get down exactly what I liked about the introduction and the first chapter. The book is extremely pro-digital technology and has done little to complicate that thus far. But it is very informative in drawing a map of the sort of subjectivity-grounded-in-postmodernism. By far the biggest problem with the book is that it is 11 years old and a considerable amount of technological advancements have happened since then.

My main concern at the moment comes from the idea of computer technology (and, more related to the present moment, cyber- or internet technology) as an extension of the self. I hope Turkle goes into more depth here, because she rejects the equation of the computer with the human mind, so the usage of the computer for the mind doesn't quite connect. Virilio and Baudrillard (and Lyotard?) seem to address this from the other point of view. It will be interesting to dive deeper into both sides.

Optics in 20th Century

"As the century of unbounded curiosity, covetous looking and the de-regulation of the gaze, the twentieth has not been the century of the 'image', as is often claimed, but of optics -- and, in particular, of the optical illusion.
Since pre-1914 days, the imperatives of propaganda (of advertising) and, subsequently, during the long period of Cold War and nuclear deterrence, secuity and iintelligence needs have gradually drawn us into an intolerable situation in which industrial optics have run wildly out of control.
This has produced the new opto-electronic arsenal, which ranges from remote medical detection devices, probing our 'hearts and loins' in real time, to global remote surveillance (from the street-corner camera to the whole panoply of orbital satellites), with the promised emergence of the cyber-circus still to come.
'The cinema involves putting the eye into uniform,' claimed Kafka. What are we to say, then, of this dictatorship exerted for more than half a century by optical hardware which has become omniscient and omnipresent and which, like any totalitarian regime, encourages us to forget we are individuated beings?"

-- Virilio, The Information Bomb, pages 28-29.

I'm interested in the connection Virilio makes with the age of curiosity, because the use of curiosity invokes an image of childishness and wonderment. There is a notion of innocence that comes with this excuse for the gaze, as if this sort of optical technology is a toy for man (Virilio elsewhere in this book talks about 1900s visions of the new century as a vision of blown-up toys for adults). Carelessness comes with curiosity and, just as "curiosity killed the cat" is a horrible saying used to prevent children from sticking their noses into other peoples' business, we can take this age of curiosity as a warning. But perhaps digital technology has made up for this by also making this an "age of consent".

We click 'agree' license and privacy agreements in digital technologies without reading them. We willingly submit details about our lives in the hopes that others will find them interesting (or dateable, or sexy, or intelligent). We post photos of ourselves, tagged with our own full names, searchable by any moderately competent search engine. We allow 'cookies' to show us form-fitted advertisements. Conversely, behind the veil of the screen, we turn and look at all these things in other people. We can browse profiles on dating or social networking sites, look at pictures of thousands of people we don't know -- and their friends and family -- without feeling like a peeping tom. Have voyeurism and consent allied themselves in digital space? Such a question is totally superficial, but worth thinking about in the sense that we can no longer strictly define what is private and what is public.

Transitions -- Quotebook to Notebook -- and a Pseudo Thesis

This post is necessary in the sense that I feel like I need to state, for my own records (though I do not currently keep records, I am told I should), this blog's transition. Previously - ie. all the posts below this one - I had laid out quotes from books I was reading and then commented on them. This will not change. I enjoy reflecting on these quotes and processing them for myself afterwards. However, the intention of the blog has changed, or better yet has been amended. Now, this blog will be regularly updated as a requisite of my Division III project in my final year at Hampshire College. Though the Div III has no title yet, the topics I will begin to explore (starting now) include:

-->Critiques of Technology, in particular Digital Technology.

-->Accessibility to Knowledge and the Encyclopedic Nature of the Internet.

-->Digital Culture, Techno-culture, Cyberculture, and any other clever configurations of culture which relies on technology or is significantly shaped by technology.

-->Communication Studies, in particular the reduction of distance (as manifested in this blog) and hyperproliferation of communicative devices

-->Visual Culture on the internet and New Media Studies, looking at diverse topics such as art on the internet and personal profiles.


I plan to draw these topics out and position them inside Subjectivity - how the subject is constituted by the world around him - from the schools of continental philosophy, critical theory, and EGS-style mass communications. Thus, my Division III will be theoretically rigorous and include a large written element. However, I also plan to explore, to no lesser degree, creative expression through technology, attempting to question digital technology's reproducibility, temporality, and utter solitude in massive sea of webpages.

Also, though I doubt anyone read this blog before now, I want to be more personal in the way I respond, while still maintaining my previous (supposed) academic demeanor.

Notes on Passwords

"Alongside commodity value there exist moral or aesthetic values which operate, for their part, in terms of a set opposition between good and bad, between the beautiful and the ugly . . . It seemed to me, however, that there was a possibility for things to circulate differently, and other cultures did indeed offer the image of a form of organization in which the transcendence of value, and with it the transcendence of power, was not established, since it is on the manipulation of values that that transcendence is constituted. It was a question of attempting to strip the object - but not just the object - of its status as commodity, to restore to it an immediacy, a brute reality which would not have a price put on it. Either a thing is 'worthless', or it is 'priceless'; in either case we are dealing with what cannot be evaluated, in the strongest sense of the term. From that point on, the exchange that can be effected operates on foundations that are no longer of the order of the contract - as in the usual system of value - but of the pact. There is a profound difference between the contract, which is an abstract convention between two terms or individuals, and the pact, which is a dual, collusive relation."

-- Baudrillard, Passwords - "Value"


The chapters "Obscenity" and "The Transparency of Evil" distinguish the fact that revealing-all or total sight becomes obscene, as in pornography, whereas something which is secret, which is not visible, takes on an evil disposition in light of its lack of transparency. Once again the limits of visibility are the restricted areas, the outer limits of itself.


"But if our world is indeed inventing a virtual double for itself, we have to see this as the fulfillment of a trend that began long ago. Reality, as we know, has not always existed. We have talked about it only since there has been a rationality to express it, parameters enabling us to represent it by coded and decodable signs.
In the virtual, we are no longer dealing with value; we are merely dealing with a turning-into-data, a turning-into-calculations, a generalized computation in which reality-effects disappear. The virtual might be said to be truly the reality-horizon, just as we talk about the event-horizon in physics. But it is also possible to think that all this is merely a roundabout route towards an as yet indiscernible aim.
There is a positive fascination today with the virtual and all its technologies. if it genuinely is a mode of disappearance, this would be an - obscure, but deliberate - choice on the part of the species itself: the decision to clone itself, lock, stock and barrel, in another universe; to disappear as the human race, properly speaking, in order to perpetuate itself in an artificial species that would have much more efficient, much more operational attributes. Is this what is at issue?"

-- Baudrillard, Passwords - "The Virtual"

Nostalgia as Utopia

Alexander R. Galloway writes in Warcraft and Utopia (ctheory.net):

"There is a second model of utopia that is less often identified: nostalgia as utopia. This utopia privileges life before capitalism, minimalism and disengagement from the world system. Thus, in the historical period in which the commodity is no longer primarily an object, but has become an image -- the so-called society of the spectacle that emerged in the middle twentieth-century -- one sees the emergence of minimalism as an aesthetic project."

This strikes a personal note. Reflecting on nostalgia, memory seems to have re-cast the past in a light that is pleasing. We find ourselves trying to re-live certain moments that are only pleasing in recollection.

Expression of Thought

"Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help lbut liberate and enslave. Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of existence, in its very dawning, is in itself and action -- a perilous act."

--Foucault, from the opening leaf of Language, Counter-Memory, Practice