Scary Monsters/Super Freaks

If as Agamben suggests “ the profanation of the unprofanable is the political task of the coming generation,” then the task of writing in the 21st century is the profanation of the apparatus of media that aims, Agamben says, at the “neutralizing (of the) profanatory power of language as pure means, at preventing language from disclosing the possibility of a new use, a new experience of the word.”

How does one profane media except through the appropriation and mis-use of its own codes? Agamben would call this a form of play. “For the cat, what is the possible use for the ball of yarn? It consists in freeing a behavior from its
genetic inscription within a given sphere (predatory activity,
hunting). The freed behavior still reproduces and mimics the
forms of the activity from which it has been emancipated, but,
in emptying them of their sense and of any obligatory relation-
ship to an end, it opens them and makes them available for a
new use.”

What I refer to as “kitsch” narratives are really media forms that, because of their propagation, repetition and relative stability, are contemporary substitutes for myth. Agamben writes that, “Play breaks up this unity (of myth that tells a story and rite that reproduces and stages it): as physical play, it drops the myth and preserves the rite; as wordplay, it effaces the rite and allows the myth to survive.”

To have the two in union produces a great satisfaction that is not unlike the process by which a new being is produced. But, if the point of the modernist project was a sacred object, the point of contemporary art ought to be perversion. For, resistance manifests not in the attempt to substitute one sacred object for another, a process that Agamben calls secularization, but in the conscious production of an object that cannot be made into a symbol of anything except that process of unmaking that produced it. Agamben calls this “pure means.” In other words, there can be no absolute winner, because there is no universally accepted set of rules.

Or as Deleuze, quoted by Zizek http://www.lacan.com/zizrealac.htm#_ftnref2
puts it, “I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed."

Zizek goes on to point out that: “This Deleuzian procedure has an unexpected theological precedent - not the Christian immaculate conception, to which he himself refers, but the Jewish legend about the birth of the Messiah, reported by Joseph in a monoscript from the 13th century. God wants to give birth to the Messiah, but knows that all of the forces of evil are waiting in front of the vagina of Shekina to kill the Messiah the minute he is born. So God goes at night to his mistress, Lilith, the symbol of evil, and penetrates her anally (the expression used can also mean that he pees into her vagina). The Messiah will come from Lilith after anal sex: this is the way God tricks the forces of evil, by bringing the Messiah through evil.”




Keren Cytter’s "History in the Making or the Secret Diaries of Linda Schultz" which combines film, dance and theater is the best example of Deleuzian monstrosity that I’ve seen. It is about a male liberal activist and a female graphic designer/waitress who fall in love and wake up one morning to find they have shifted genders. Cytter utilizes repetition in dialogue, music (I am almost positive it’s constructed from free Garage Band loops) and choreography to empty it of a dominant meaning. As Zizek points out, “If the founding move that establishes a symbolic universe is the empty gesture, how is a gesture emptied? How is its content neutralized? Through repetition.”


Cytter’s project is not purely nihilistic. She acknowledges our nostalgia for revolution—though she kills off the protagonist--liberal activist Webber, she allows him to resurrect again and again with his identifying data slightly changed. In this way, Cytter hints at the potential for revolution. Nothing is infinitely reproducible, no category of knowledge or naming is stable for ever. [R]evolution will happen, Cytter suggests, not with a grand, unified effort, but in the slippage.

Again, this is from Zizek’s essay, “Today’s crisis is indeed one of experience, that is, a crisis of the destruction of experience, and the ‘spectacle’ is indeed the means of that destruction. But what exactly is the relation between spectacle and the destruction of existence and temporality? If by spectacle we name our captivation by the techniques of the audiovisual technical system, then the question is to understand this process. It is a question of understanding what it is about experience as such that makes us susceptible to such captivation. And this means understanding the ways in which the flux of consciousness is able to enter into or be entered by another flux, that flux constituted by the programs of the audiovisual system, programs which are nothing but, as Stiegler calls them, “industrial temporal objects.” If clues about this process can be inferred from Agamben’s writing, these are not pursued to the point of constituting an analysis. In the end, Agamben fails to grasp that if the word or the image is insubstantial or immaterial, nevertheless the conditions of both are always material, and technical, and therefore historical. Agamben fails to think through the history of the exteriorisation process itself, to think the historicity of the changing milieu, from language to writing to photography to cinema, and beyond. For Agamben, in the end, everything is reducible to language, the apparatus par excellence, and hence what is taking place today is seen only as destructive (which it is), not as the opening of new dimensions of preindividual potential (which it potentially is).”

Google images is perhaps the best example of this potentiality. Below are search results for “sacred.”











There is something wonderful and horrible about this. Clearly some video game has co-opted the word in the collective imagination. Nevertheless, that “sacred” has been released from its conventional associations opens up the possibility of new ways of working, thinking, communicating.

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.