I Fell In Love With A Dead Boy

the molecular unconscious, on the contrary, knows nothing of
castration, because partial objects lack nothing and form free
multiplicities as such; because the multiple breaks never cease producing
flows, instead of repressing them, cutting them at a single stroke—the
only break capable of exhausting them; because the syntheses constitute
local and nonspecific connections, inclusive disjunctions, nomadic
conjunctions: everywhere a microscopic transsexuality, resulting in the
woman containing as many
men as the man, and the man as many women, all capable of entering—
men with women, women with men—into relations of production of
desire that overturn the statistical order of the sexes. Making love is not
just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus




“I love you.”

In so far as love has an "I", this book is about identity. To broaden the concept of love and compassion requires a loosening of this "I", such that the other’s concerns become my own. I want to talk to Cyril, my web designer, about making a virtual perfume bottle, an old fashioned kind of cut crystal with a little red-tasseled stopper. I’d ask my readers to say these words and send me the file. When you opened the bottle, they would all play—peppery, musky, flowery---pheromones, phonemes.


"I have this thought sometimes, that I would like to be made of chocolate . The finest, silkiest kind, stuff that tastes a little like wine and a little like earth, stuff so good that it makes you drool like a baby when it melts on your tongue and you feel pleasure spread like warmth from your belly to the top of your head. If I could, I would feed the world this way. I'd break off pieces of me as I walked through a hungry crowd, a finger here, there a leg. I'd scrape chunks from my chocolate belly and feed oceans of fish and skies full of gulls.

I realize (sometimes) that love has nothing at all to do with me or any estimation of my happiness. And yet how miraculous that loving someone makes me happier than anything and bigger than I am without it. What mechanism is it that makes less always more?

Please, don't mistake what I am saying for desiring abuse or self-abnegation. You see, I want someday to learn to live like that-- to be part of the world, to let love flow everywhere, to the flushed faces of beauties and the festering wounds of a beggar, pumped from my heart, like blood is pumped, without calculation.”


I didn’t write this. S. did. If it is read as “feminine” because it is lyrical, because it reeks of sacrifice, it is still not exactly my “I” that wrote it. The fissure is filled by the thought of difference-- the rubric I provide. 19 years old. Gay man. It comforts. We can breath a sigh of relief. There is some explanation for our dis-ease.


The Cinematic Relations of Corporeal Feminism
Theresa L. Geller http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/geller.html
“In other words, the movement-image and gender performance both may "seek to approximate the ideal of a substantial ground of identity;" however, "their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this 'ground.'" Discontinuity reveals what, in effect, constitutes both bodies and the cinematic image—singularities. "Singularities are the impersonal events from which we compose the world into actual bodies," and it is from decomposing the cinematic image, or gender performance, into its singularities that an active image of thought is made available."




COMING TO A THEATER NEAR YOU (YOUTUBE)

The Red Dress:

When I was little, my mother said
Shame on you, and
it’s a crying shame
And shame about that
She didn’t say
Shame is a red dress
That you will wear
Shame is a tight red dress
worn without underwear
She didn’t say that
You will cry tears
Hot as tea,
Hot as pee
streaming down your leg
In kindergarten
She said, “God is good.”
She said, “Love all men as your brothers.”
She did not say,
“If you love him you will let him hurt you.”
She did not say,
“If you love him, it will not matter what.”
He put on my face like he put on love
With his hands
And I looked in the mirror
And saw myself –as if for the
First time.
My cheeks like apples
My mouth a laceration.
When he kissed me
My features slid off
Dripping like juice
from a squeezed fruit.
I found the dress in the morning
Lying on the floor
I picked it up.
On the front was a stain,
A dark island of semen in a sea of red.
All morning, I traced the routes
I couldn’t find the way back.
So here I sit, with the dress in my hands.
It is nothing, a cloth,
A synthetic blush
You wanted to shame me,
you said I wasn’t much of a man,
Then why dress me in red
the opposite of surrender?
You should have dressed me in white
And made me your bride.







D. N. Rodowick - Unthinkable Sex: Conceptual Personae and the Time-Image from the online journal Invisible Culture
"Conceptual personae are the subjective presuppositions that map a plane of immanence….
the conceptual persona only rarely or allusively appears for himself. Nevertheless, he is there, and however nameless or subterranean, he must always
be reconstituted by the reader. Conceptual personae manifest a non-teleological movement where the subject wants to differentiate her or himself in constructing new concepts or positions of identity
that function as vectors for becoming.”


Time as layers of sediment
Media fragments
PETALS
SKINS
Face as screen.
Text as tattoo.

Sebastian is dead. I am resurrecting him into his future, my present or else he is dreaming his own story, beginning middle end.

"There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules, and particles of all kinds. There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages. […] We call this plane, which knows only longitudes and latitudes, speeds and haecceities, the plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to a plan(e) of organization or development)."[3] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

IF S. CAN BE FOUND IT IS IN What D&G call STRATIGRAPHIC TIME.

THE PROCESS I CALL RADICAL SUTURING IS UNIQUELY SUITED FOR THE INTERNET—so familiar is that idea of having multiple widows of various media open at the same time. What is the fuel that initiates the mechanism? THE DESIRE TO KNOW, >DESIRE FOR THE STORY> the desire for TRANSCENDENCE or else death.


The text is that which is written on the body. “TRANSCENDENCE” and “DEATH” are tattooed on Sebastian’s hands like Goan crosses. But, the novel is not only text, and the act of reading is not reinscription, but movie-making, the text becomes fluid as it is projected onto a ground of image and sound.

Perversion--with a cherry on top

“Structurally, perversion such as I have delineated for you on the imaginary plane,
can only be sustained with a precarious status which, at every moment is contested, from within, for the subject. It is always fragile, at the mercy of an inversion…The fundamental uncertainty of the perverse relation, the fact that it can find no way of becoming grounded in any satisfying action, makes up one aspect of the drama of homosexuality.” Jacques Lacan

I want to suggest that my project to live online as a young gay man is profoundly perverse, it doubles so many losses that within a phallocentric economy, it can only be understood as a form of masochism.

BUT...

the fact is that I do not experience this as masochistic, for I see my double identity as a performative feminist act that questions the very idea that feminine identity is formed through a masquerade that serves heterosexual male desire. I do not deny that this play is an act of radical self destabilization which, if one remains within the dominant hetero male symbolic realm can only be read as a loss of self that is tantamount to castration. But, I think that outside of this system, it is possible to experience loss differently, as a kind of excess, an ecstatic remainder, the piece(s) which can not be incorporated into a whole (because the whole is imaginary.) As in the meditations performed by the beguine mystics this fluidity of identity is experienced as divine.


This doubling of surfaces--the persona of the male homosexual that overlays, but does not replace the female is not a disavowal of castration nor a fetishized femininized male identity but an active rebellion that destabilizes phallocentric structure itself.

When nothing remains...nothing but skin and bones, when bones appear to be nothing...nothing but layers of skin, what once was called "reality" becomes not only unbearably light but impossibly thin. At this point...in this point, the boy is deprived of its substance and appears on the verge of disappearing. The missing body sets in motion the detective story ---in all its (dis)guises. Mark C. Taylor, Hiding

In Irigaray's terminology, I am performing a mimetic act of strategic essentialism, for, "if women's bodies are viewed as multiple and dispersed, women should speak from that position in a playful way that suggests that this view stems from a masculine economy that values identity and unity (e.g. the penis or the Phallus) and excludes women as the other (e.g. lack, dispersed, or "nothing to see"). http://www.iep.utm.edu/i/irigaray.htm

In other words in my world, this “No” is not the threat of the law, in the name of the father, it is the “No” that itself denies a transcendental signification and in doing so, provides a site for embracing other ways of being and communication with an other.

Thus, with Sebastian, I want to create a inner experience that transcribes "loss" and "abjection," into something creative and sacred. If I can do this, it is possible that, Sebastian's own abjection, his act of radical forgiveness (in the face of a brutal beating) which is the central action in the novel, can be read not as act of self-loathing, but as an expression of a divine love: either a compassion for all others (even those that hate) or as love for God (love of the divine.)

How can I transmute a personal mystical experience into something that communicates? How to communicate with all these unknown others. It will require a move from the imaginary to writing much like that attempted by Georges Bataille.


I will not talk about language as fetish because to do so can only bring me back into the economy I am rejecting. Rather, I see Sebastian as a form of poetry. Poetic language resists fetishization through its instability and generosity. In other words, poetry mimics, in material form, the immaterial state of consciousness I am trying to achieve.

Bataille however is not confident that poetry can achieve his aim. He says, "I fear courting poetry. Poetry is a drawn arrow. If I have aimed well, what counts, what I want--is neither the arrow nor the target (but)the moment when the arrow is lost, dissolves into the air of the night, until the memory of the arrow is lost."

Of course, in true Bataillean fashion, he opts to use a metaphor to describe his rejection of poetry. Bataille understands that the moment of (self) negation is a silent moment, it can not speak itself. For this, it requires the resurrection of the body and identity, memory and language.

Thus, "as the site of endless deferral and difference, writing contains asceticism without capitulating to idealistic totalization and the effacement of history. Yet as a present trace through which communication occurs, writing engenders community without necessitating the fetishization of the other." Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy


Moreover, I see Bataille's writing as an early form of hybrid media, one that, anticipates the disembodied world of online presence. "Bataille’s textually generated, always moving, desirous, anguished and annihilated subjectivity replaces the lacerated body as the site of communication, suffering, desire, and identification.” Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy

Bataille, however, (perhaps because he identifies himself as a hetero male and, thus, has more to lose,) continues to revisit a site of trauma that presupposes the transcendental whole. He seems to forget that pain as it is lived is experienced not as trauma, but as pure sensation. It is only when the cognitive consciousness begins telling its stories, connecting that sensation with objects and events and thoughts of past, present, and future, that is, when it is re-inscribed in the body, in time and space, that trauma as such occurs. But, the site of trauma is also the site of "communication, suffering, desire and identification" in other words, it is the site of compassion and identification with the other. (It is emphatically not abstract or dehistorized like Bataille's Chinese torture victim is).


The next post will discuss the work of Derek Jarman whose work, like Battaille's, employs (an) imagistic, non-linear way of working…(that)… disrupts the hierarchies of both medium and narrative and, in doing so, refuses patriarchal logic.” Chrissie Iles, "Derek Jarman" for Serpentine Gallery, London.

This clip from Sebastiane, Jarman's first feature length film demonstrates his creative achievement. The most striking thing about this scene is the radical equality of the beautiful lovers and their lovemaking. Watching it, I suddenly understood that not only was it impossible for such a scene to be filmed between a man and a woman, but that other possible structures for viewing/touching/loving (an)other can and should be sought.

Reading:
Jacques Lacan Seminar XX
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman
Mark C. Taylor Hiding
Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History
Chrissie Iles, Derek Jarman: Brutal Beauty
Georges Bataille, Guilty

Being (S.)

For a few weeks now, I have been living on-line as a not quite out of the closet, beautiful 19 year old gay man residing in the Midwest with my parents and attending community college.

I have proclaimed my first love on line. I picture him dark, longish hair, side-burns, cleft chin, leather jacket, clever, not smart and charming as a dancing cobra. I’ve wrote the end of the affair today, inspired by reading Genet’s The Thief’s Journal on the elliptical at the gym this morning. (thanks for this, Mark Amerika) It’s hot and dirty, what else? I already had the youtube video in mind before I wrote the post: S. in teary drag (he’s been dressed by his lover in an act meant to humiliate) slow dancing with his beloved. It’s going to be lovely: tender and strange. Sartre writes in the introduction that in Genet’s work, he uses a double to represent himself. “Each of them has the strange property, of being both itself and a reflection of itself.”

Yes. I feel the same way with the man I am.

At first, inhabiting him made me intensely uneasy. I felt myself leaking out and him seeping in. Contamination. But, now that the initial wound is beginning to heal, the graft is starting to itch. And, an itch, as we all know, can be a source of both pleasure and pain

(depending on the intensity of the stroke.)

I feel myself wanting to scratch. I am falling in love with him—my dream self. There is a woman on-line who could be me—smart, likes poetry, has a small child, a distant husband, and she is falling in love with him, too. Because, for one, she can, because he’s gay and nineteen and writes like an angel about how “the wide world had shrunk to a six inch plot of warm, brown skin….how (his neck) plunged past the collar into the white foam of his shirt… the scapula—those bones like fins cutting through the ocean of skin.” So, who is she falling for?

I think of Marina Abramovic’s Role Exchange piece (1975) in which she and a prostitute switched places—she--in the prostitute’s show window and the prostitute at the gallery. Now this is clearly about embodied identity, but what of disembodied identity? This kind of identity is much more about what and how we write (language) and the display of our preferences (books, movies, tv shows, music.) If I seduce, the framework is gay 19 year old man--those are the limits, but the rest is a convergence of what I want to show and what my “friends” want to see.

It ends at the body, of course—I will forever be closeted. A lonely gay man near me in MO wanted to meet (not just for sex, he assured me) but, of course, I couldn’t. I haven’t heard from him since.

Today I met young woman who is a children’s minister whose page is devoted to the suffering of children, but who posts intensely erotic poetry on myspace.

And, I think we are all leading double, triple, quadruple lives. Perhaps we always have and we are just now seeing how fluid it can be when the pieces of ourselves are given in bytes.

More of Sartre on Genet’s Thief’s Journal: “His stories are not stories. They excite and fascinate you; you think he is relating facts and suddenly you realize he is describing rites…His memories are not memories, they are exact but sacred; he speaks about his life like an evangelist, as a wonder-struck witness.”

Yes. How odd that before I’d read this, I’d already planned to film a performance of my feast day.

After the Fall

Video still "After the Fall"

http://www.alixpearlstein.com

Some of us at the RNDT saw Alix Pearlstein’s wonderful video work “After the Fall” at the Kitchen. The main piece is a 4 channel video installation that forms a box around viewers seated in the middle. Pearlstein stages (literally on a stage—think Dogville) a series of confrontations between actors and films using four moving cameras. The action is spare, aggressive—a shoving match that involves two of the actors ganging up on another one so that the “loser” ends up “crushed” under a piece of foam board. There is nothing allegorical or even very interesting about these contests. The actors are of different ethnicity. Some are dressed in a way that might suggest character traits (class, education, personality,) but others are dressed in indistinct clothing of the same hue that suggests only the possibility of an allegiance with other actors. In other words, there is no real narrative save for an all too familiar picture of aggression and humiliation. The brilliant part is that Pearlstein gives just enough of a framework for viewers to project their own experiences on the actors. At the same time, she stymies our desire for a good guy, bad guy, or even a story by repeating the contest and by using multiple cameras. This work has some elements in common with Omer Fast’s The Casting (staging, multiple perspectives, uncertain narratives.) Both pieces demonstrate what seems to be a trend: true viewer participation in the work. Of course, art develops alongside changes in technology and culture. So, it is not surprising that the harnessing of viewer’s visual and mental labor is becoming part of art making. We are (thankfully) moving away from the incredible narcissism of artist’s private world where we as viewers were invited to join in, but not really. This art is far less insular. Indeed, it requires the viewer to activate the artwork. (I’m sure Michael Fried is dying here.) Art has become not only a spectacle, but also a mirror, and, it ain’t too pretty. But, it's better than not looking at all.

This from Marjorie Perloff's fab book The Futurist Moment, on Fried's objection to theatricality in art:






It seems clear that theatrical art is what is required now. I don't know about you, but the idea of a wholly manifest, self-sufficient object scares me, it sounds like something the Bush administration made up.

WE ARE WILD FOR THIS MAN

and we think his son is oh, so, sexy...



we'd like to give them both honorary membership in the Revolution Nostalgia Disco Theater. We'll have to think of a name for the award (the Bruno, has been taken already by the SETI league), but it's clear that it will be in the form of a miniature revolving disco ball (what else.)

What to say about this clip except to quote Deleuze on Garrel which is how I found him in the first place.

"This may be the first case of a cinema of constitution, one which is truly constitutive: constituting bodies and in this way restoring our belief in the world, restoring our reason...It is doubtful that cinema is sufficient for this; but if the world has become bad cinema, in which we no longer believe, surely a true cinema can contribute to giving us back reasons to believe in the world and in vanished bodies?"

This is from Garrel's L'enfant secret (which is UNAVAILABLE!!!as far as I can tell.)



Here you see the quiet, intense focus on gesture and movement. Bodies, volumes, emerge from or are consumed by light and shadow.

Reading: lovely little essay on L'enfante secret http://www.rouge.com.au/1/garrel.html

Speaking of bodies and missing persons. I saw the Vik Muniz show at Sikkema this week. I thought it was a clever idea--making exact replicas of the verso sides of iconic paintings and photographs. I was prepared to be tickled for a moment by the trick, but wow! GREAT SHOW! http://www.sikkemajenkinsco.com/exhibitions.html




Muniz makes us, the viewers, the missing bodies of the future. The experience becomes an elegiac projection of the past as well as the future. In the here and now, to read the verso of Van Gogh's Starry Night is to evoke a personal history of the missing image. I felt such (bodily) tenderness to those wooden objects. To think that humans had cared for, made their mark, and passed on this object, was heart-rending. Not, because it elicited the lost aura of the masterpiece, but because it made me mourn the loss of the physical object in the midst of all its images. I thought about a day when it would be too expensive or dangerous for the painting to exist outside of some titanium underground vault, and even if that were not the case, how the generations to come will perhaps not even be aware that there is a difference.

Occasional notes on Cinema--Cinema and Cliché

"A cliché is a sensory-motor image of the thing. As Bergson says, we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather what is in our interest to perceive, by virtue of economic interests, ideological interests and psychological demands (I'd add physical, too.) We therefore normally perceive only clichés. But, if our sensory-motor schemata jam or break then a different type of image can appear: a pure optical-sound image, the whole image without metaphor, brings out the thing in itself, literally, in its excess of horror or beauty, in its radical or unjustifiable character, because it no longer has to be justified..." Deleuze, The Time-Image

some thoughts on this: if our consciousness according to Bergson and Deleuze is by its nature, impoverished relative to the entirety of the image because of its subtraction by the body, then perhaps desire is an irreducible component of consciousness, in so far as memory (of other possible images) is operative. Now, consider the future with barrage of images and mechanical memories allowing archival retrieval on a scale that is not possible with the human brain. The situation of information overload can lead to a desire for stasis, a desire for culling and comfort provided by kitsch. At the same time, kitsch is like drinking salt water. It can alleviate immediate thirst, but in the end leads to further dehydration and a violent desire for fresh water. Unfortunately, kitsch also reinforces just those sensory-motor schemata which make us see only kitsch. A rather desperate situation which, perhaps, requiring a trauma, a cut, a break of some sort to reset it. Now, where does this leave language, which also has its clichés and its poetry? Again, I reiterate the importance of language, despite its tendency toward metaphor. (Unlike Deleuze, I believe in the destabilizing potential of metaphor.)


“There is no longer any metaphor, rather metamorphosis. Metamorphosis abolishes metaphor, which is the mode of language, the possibility of communicating meaning. Metamorphosis is at the radical point of the system, the point where there is no longer any law or symbolic order.” Baudrillard, Forget Foucault.


WE HERE AT RNDT MAINTAIN THAT REALITY REMAINS A BULLET IN THE HEAD.




To fool ourselves into thinking that in a cybernetic universe, our brains are not hardwired for wanting fixed points of meaning is thinking we can google our way to enlightenment. Bullshit. Thus, was Revolution Nostalgia Disco Theater born. For the full manifesto go to http://www.reconstructingmayakovsky.com and click on "Manifesto."

The Life and Times of St. Sebastian

"Saint Sebastian" by F. Holland Day, 1910.


St. Sebastian is the newest project of the Revolution Nostalgia Disco Theater. Born two days ago, he is not quite able to stand. We've given him bones. We hope the online community will give him skin(s).

We think we know how his story will end. But, to quote our resurrected Mayakovsky, "it's just that it never turns out quite the way you expect."



We are currently seeking 1) an open-minded amateur filmmaker
2) actor (18-21, slim, handsome, blond, or light brown hair, open-minded ( homoerotic overtone --no nudity) for youtube "home movies." We are in NYC area, you should be, too. Please send an email if interested.




If we were truly ubermensch we'd have no qualms about this. As it is, it makes us quite uncomfortable. We are experiencing waves of akithesia, that is the feeling of wanting to crawl out of our skin ( and into another's--in a kind of ontological cross-dressing.) We begin to question the value of our identity, we feel the boundaries dissolve. The theological equivalent of this is "shame." But, more on that later.

THE PRICE OF A WIG
Uploaded by brest44

To read:
St. Sebastian as gay martyr
http://books.google.com/books?id=YdaI7y2B3-UC&dq Chapter 5

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/nietzsche_birth_tragedy.htm

Amy Herzog Images of Thought and Acts of Creation: Deleuze, Bergson, and the Question of Cinema http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue3/herzog.htm

Resisting The Lure of Kitsch

Perhaps I am a romantic when it comes to the divine
word
(though I do think there is neurobiological data to
back up this bias) but I consider verbal
language to be the most
human of attributes. I am afraid of what it will mean
if language is reduced
reduced to genres of speech "cheerful, acoustic."
The foreboding I have for our future is the loss of
language. I can not imagine it. And it brings up a
terrible question of what the new human will be. Of
course, the Futurists explored the idea of new
languages, new ways of communicating, but visual
language is different from the written word.
Eisenstein knew this, all the fascists certainly did,
they couldn't wait to instruct the masses. In the
present time, the military-industrial complex has
evolved into a military-media complex.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlzdZqSVbJ4

There is an
aestheticization of politics on a scale that perhaps
only the clairvoyant Walter Benjamin could have
imagined. The last paragraph of The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction bears repeating.

"Let Art Flourish--the world pass away," says fascism,
expecting from war, as Marinetti admits, the artistic
gratification of a sense of perception altered by
technology. This is evidently the consumation of l'art
pour l'art. Humankind, which once, was an object of
contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become
one for itself. Its self-annihilation has reached the
point where it can experience its own annihilation as a
supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing
of politics as practiced by fascism. Communism replies
by politicizing art."

And us? What should we do? Is
the only "ism" left "humanism?" What does that mean?
What does it mean to be human in the 21st century?

I am not an eternalist. I embrace the freedom that
comes with this ability to re- organize knowledge. I
think the lurking problem with this free-for-all
organization is that everything becomes equivalent, a
currency to be traded. Popular sites, those capturing
the most attention, will determine not only the
popular aethetics but
the "nature" of the world. It brings up the problem
of kitsch, aethetics and power. Without stability,
the seductiveness of kitsch increases. Not only does
it provide familiarity, it provides community. (The
relationship between kitsch and architecture
especially these very strange planned communities like
Celebration USA is also interesting.)


I take this consideration of kitsch from U. of C.'s
media theory site:
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mitchell/glossary2004/kitsch.htm#Figure%201

"The appeal of kitsch resides in its formula, its
familiarity, and its validation of shared
sensibilities...The self-congratulatory spirit of
kitsch can also be seen as a deception. Kitsch holds
up a 'highly considerate mirror,' according to Hermann
Broch, that allows contemporary man to 'recognize
himself in the counterfeit image it throws back at him
and to confess his own lies (with a delight which is
to a certain extent sincere).' By providing
comfort, kitsch performs a denial. It glosses over
harsh truths and anesthetizes genuine pain. As Harold
Rosenberg perceived: 'There is no counterconcept to
kitsch. Its antagonist is not an idea but reality."'


You see the problem. In the web-based world, there is
no reality. There is no antidote to kitsch. And what
does that mean for the art of the future?
Mayakovsky and Burliuk threatened to throw Pushkin off
the boat.. But, what happens when there are no old
gods to throw overboard or what if there is simply the
next batch of gods. What is radically different now is
the development of a culture industry and an economy
of attention that can feedback to alter those visions
in real time.

Artist and writers, and all those who want to resist, will need to explore and create
alternative forms of organizing information because
that perhaps above all other systems of "mapping"
shapes our perspective of the world and the vision of
the future.

Some very interesting examples can be found at
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/01/-map.php



Artists and writers need to develop alternative systems for
distributing information and collective/nomadic
actions. We need to explore and demonstrate how these
alternative systems can effect social space and the
construction of community. Psychogeography is one way
to transform a city. Perhaps we could employ a code
and a method for mapping (like the stickers or the
chalk or even texting where clues can be communicated
to everyone participating) with the goal being that
people will arrive at a certain time and place to
witness a performance (preferably something this shy
of legal) on a rooftop or at someone's house or in an
abandoned warehouse....And it ought to be one hell of
a party.


Billboard by artist Suzanne Opton

Movie poster from the U.S. Army

For instance see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Culture_jamming_techniques

Also
check out the pdf file of a mass anti-war effort in
1936 by Princeton students who wanted to be paid a
bonus with the expectation that they would be veterans
of future wars since war had become an endless
occupation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veterans_of_Future_Wars

http://www.archive.org/details/PatriotismPrepaid


Another way to resist is to develop an artistic vision that
recognizes that we are still bodies in
space. That is why live performance is so important.
Performance acts as an antidote to kitsch
because it is happens to real bodies that excrete
sticky fluids.

I would argue that the other antagonist to kitsch is
poetry. It is the hardest form of language, it resists
easy consumption, at its core, it remains unfamiiar,
untranslatable even to the native speaker. Of course,
you will remember that Plato kicked the lyrical poets
out of his perfect Republic (the ones who wrote epics
could remain) "to educate our soldiers."

One of the most effective antidotes to kitsch is humor, (not the safe haven provided by irony)
but slapstick because it involves the body and offends good taste
and
parody because it represents the possibility of making
the monologic, a dialogue. This regarding Bakhtin's
idea of heteroglossia: If a speaker assumes another's
discourse and "objectifies it" for his own purposes,
the double-voicing is a stylization of the original.
The "stylizer" assumes the assimilated discourse to be
essentially correct and in agreement with his own
aims. Stylization turns to parody when the intentions
of the quoting discourse are somehow different from
the intentions of the quoted discourse. "In contrast
to stylization," says Bakhtin, "parody introduces ... a semantic intention that is directly opposed to the
original one."

Some Thoughts on the Nature of Kitsch or Why Art Matters

Art is to life as Kitsch is to death. Kitsch has become our COMMON Communion, IMMUNE TO HISTORY, RESISTANT TO REASON. Kitsch is the Ventriloquist’s dummy, a bloodless Corpse at the scene of a real murder. Swept along by the flow of information, we Are detectives forever collecting the evidence, Forever making the case. Seekers of An Undying truth, we have replaced the inconstancy of human witness and memory with the incontrovertible proof of email. –

--from a Petit Manifesto
(for full text and a beautiful downloadable pdf version go to http://www.reconstructingmayakovsky.com )


Let’s say you make this little film for youtube using public domain images. Let’s say you want to add a soundtrack to it. Let’s say, like me, you have no musical talent and you can’t afford to pay the Rolling Stones a million dollars for a snippet of “”, and you don’t want to appropriate something because most likely you’ll be sued. You might find yourself parked before your Mac with only an inarticulate notion that you wish to generate in the listener a sensation of happiness—not of the transcendent variety, not Ode to Joy joy, just an everyday good feeling. Stymied, you might see what possibilities the application “Garage Band” offers. You might try searching the free loop library for “Cheerful.” You might then, for reasons as varied as personal taste or wanting to invoke a pastoral contentment, limit your search further with the category “Acoustic.”

Play sound file of loops below.

And, damned if they aren’t all cheerful, acoustic--every single one. If one invokes a cowboy riding across the wind-swept plains, and the other a careening red pick-up truck full of drunken teenagers—the general result is the same. Cheerful, acoustic. It is diabolically mechanistic, and too true.

The power of kitsch resides in its ability to imitate the visceral effects of art, if those effects could be simplified. To argue that kitsch does not generate real sentiment: wringing sadness, bleeding pity, bounding joy is wrong. Invoking limpid emotion—eternal and delocalized-- is all that kitsch does well. The purity of feeling acts as a substitute for depth. If kitsch generates an idea as well, it is in the form of a nearly meaningless abstraction like “freedom” or “truth” or “love,” or “hero” or “tragedy.”

The Googlification of knowledge includes the Googlification of sentiment; the most popular will always float to the top.
We cling to the purity of sensation as if to an angel. Yes, I feel. Let the tears flow. Because I have no language left for the more difficult feelings, to say nothing of the more difficult ideas—those located in time and space in the context of a mutable and unreasonable collective or personal desire. I am mute, but I feel. Cheerful, acoustic.

Technology has not forced this upon us. Technology arises from the same social, political and cultural conditions that enable us to utilize it. We need to begin to talk about why this is happening and what we ought to do about it.

We used to have ways of perpetuating the illusion of solid ground: place, season, ritual, history. We used to have words like “sky” and “reason” and “god.” IN A WORLD OF IMAGES, IN A GROWING ECONOMY OF SPECTACLE THE WRITTEN WORD BECOMES A FORM OF PROTEST. WORDS CREATE A LIMINAL SPACE WHERE MEANING CAN BE LOST OR DISTORTED. THEIR DISTANCE FROM THE WORLD IS THEIR TRUTHFULNESS. Even if used for propaganda, words are ideologically unstable. The possibility of a secret code is always present. Words operate primarily through ideas. The sensations they invoke are always at a remove. Because written language operates in a looser conceptual space than images, it is in a unique position to disturb and challenge the desire for a particular narrative. It is inherently anti-kitsch.