fuse

2004-06-04T12:59:00.000-07:00

"Naturally the... people don't want war.... it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a Fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a Communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them that they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."

Of course. There are a few suppositions embedded within this Goeringesque insight: one is that in any society 'the people' need to be 'brought on board' in a supportive way (if only in the sense that 'the people' won't be in the streets en masse protesting whatever 'government' action), and two that the 'leaders' might have ideas that are somehow different or at odds with 'the people' and might want to embody those ideas within some course of state action that 'the people' might not embrace or support, but for prodding by 'the leaders'....
And this is so in *any* society, within any scheme of political economy or structure of government. Issues of interest (class?) and consent (withheld, or not).

2004-05-26T09:49:00.000-07:00

Here's something to think about: "Becoming-imperceptible is a process of elimination whereby one divests oneself of all coded identity and engages in the abstract lines of a nonorganic life, the immanent, virtual lines of continuous variation that play through discusive regimes of signs and nondiscursive machinic assemblages alike" (Quoting Ronald Bogue, Deleuze's Wake, p. 73).
And this is a description of what Deleuze calls 'minor literature' and the embodiment by such literature of a 'type of life' that is not (merely) the replication of dominant (regimes of signifying) motifs, but rather....
So here focussing on issues of 'becoming-imperceptible' and the 'process of elimination' when read through the dominant signifying regimes of a political economy. And the sense of 'freedom' implied in the process of 'divestiture' where 'coded identity' is both effaced/destroyed and recreated/embodied. The exchange of one (coded identity) for another.

2004-03-22T18:47:00.000-08:00

A festival of the oppressed....

Name branding within a flexible, permeable marketing framework = 'getting the word out'

A political ecology cum marketing strategy: notes toward a deeper (more or less) 'penetration'....

The relations of production effaced (maybe?) by the relations of (non)recognition?

To the extent one fails to attend to issues related to presentation/distribution....

"Art and daily life: have they not long become fused in processes of fashion and design shaping every second act of consumption?" (Perry Anderson)

So... we're just waiting for the *third* act?

2004-02-23T13:36:00.000-08:00

So thinking about the blog as utensil: spoon, fork, knife. Different utilities for different utensils. But: using a spoon as a fork; a knife as a fork. A spoon as a knife? It's been done.... Thinking here of John Cage: 'Music for Prepared Piano'.... 'Content for Prepared Blog'.... Can the blog be 'tuned' in a manner analogous to the way Cage 'tuned' his piano? Well.... But:
How about blog as mixer, or can opener, or, let's see, sieve, or... juicer! Oh boy! 'Would you care for some papaya with that monkey??' You must be joking! So some blogs cut (like a knife, yeah, the song), others seem to be 'spoon-fed', and that's not a criticism.... Is it a description?

Suppose it's possible to apply the utensil metaphor to poetics, or, let's say, poetry, or, at least, poems. So the poem (pome) is a spoon, a fork, or a knife.... So words, or some subset or variant thereof, or symbols, spooned into the work, or cut in as with the aid of a knife, or... well, you see....

Working out the essence of this form (blogging) as residing in it's dailiness, of a person blogging.... Telling all, or some part thereof.
Working out the notion of 'season' --- there's 4 of them always and everywhere.... But Spring in New York is not Spring in Bangkok. So 'inherent' qualities even of 'natural' phenomena seem suspect, or at least, questionable....
Always nice to see statements like.... 'This is what 'x' is' as if that settles it....
Better to be unsettled. Maybe a blog is a spoon that unsettles....

2003-12-12T08:53:00.000-08:00

It's only been six months, right? That's not all that long....
The blink of an eye, really....

Still thinking about how to use this blogging thing, what it is, what it could be. These are old issues, I suppose, discussed and debated months ago, in various precincts by various correspondents, and in various ways and manners....

Hoping that blogging will somehow liberate me, in some way.... And why or how should I even entertain such a thought?? 'Liberate' me.... Liberate 'me'....'Liberate me'.... What a quaint notion. This long ago should have been put to rest, or at least sequestered within a more 'reasonable' environment....
How could I think such a thing?? Maybe 'cause it (you know, 'it') can, but only if....

2003-06-09T08:40:00.000-07:00

"...synapses hate grooves, they hate them."

"....The difficulty of all is in flux. Perhaps that is the very point at which to start."

"Human labor / resurrects things / from the dead."

"What about measure, I learnt:
Look in your own ear and read."

"Perhaps when everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful."

Imitation is the only mistake possible in art, because it does not recognize the law of time.

human nature: infinite formless variation

"Our proper work now if we love mankind and the world we live in is revolution."

"Private project of / enlightenment's no longer sufficient. Not / just self- but social-realization."

"The windows of his music were open -- not wondering, to quote Meister Eckhart, 'Am I right or doing something wrong'?"

"... cast into the immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and that know me not, I am frightened."

".... words are born on his tongue under the impact of the moment."

"words...[had] become impoverished in content, they had become one-sided and empty formulae."

"The world is given to us only once."

a field of oriented possibilities, an 'open' text....

"The only human value resides in an active soul."

to expose and destroy conventional habits of signification, based on principled opposition....

"The bad effects of my childhood still control my life."

"You can't carry it around in your head forever."

"The only reality is the translation of one's ideas into rhythm and beautiful movements."

"The other says: I have no method.
I merely undress in powerful moonlight
delighting the wretched few
and plunge in and drown each time."

"If we really want to understand the origin of signification --- and, unless we do, we shall not understand any other creation or any other culture, for we shall fall back upon the supposition of an intelligible world in which everything is signified in advance --- we must give up every signification that is already institutionalized and return to the starting point of a non-signifying world."

"Every code is at once arbitrary and rational; recourse to a code is thus always an oppportunity for man to prove himself, to test himself through a reason and a liberty. In this sense, the analysis of codes perhaps allows an easier and surer historical definition of a society than the analysis of its signifieds, for the latter can often appear as trans-historical, belonging more to an anthropological base than to a proper history."

"A work determines its own needs."

Quoting Andrews, Wittgenstein, Godard, Zukofsky, Kubrick, Cage, Pascal, Mach, Eco, Emerson, Bernstein, Coolidge, Colette, Perelman, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Higgins.

2003-06-08T16:38:00.000-07:00

"Even when you have nothing, there's something going on." (Edward Kolb, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Chicago)

2003-05-27T18:20:00.000-07:00

I'm getting ready to have been blogging....

2003-05-07T12:32:00.000-07:00

A political economy of poetics. A poetics of political economy.

2003-05-07T12:29:00.000-07:00

Circa 1982, thinking about Foucault....

ethics
thinking <---------> acting = politics
ethics

Thinking and acting are connected in an ethical sense, but one which has results that have to be called 'political'....

"Ethics is a practice; ethos a manner of being."

Morality as the search for 'truth': the/a relation to the/an 'other'....

ethics/politics/genealogy of truth congruent to science/politics/ethics

Consider relations between: a scientific domain/ a political structure/ a moral practice.

Three fundamental elements of any experience (or: components necessary for constituting a field of experience): a game of truth, relations of power, forms of relation to oneself and to others.

2003-05-06T08:38:00.000-07:00

poetry = disassembling a ratio (B. Andrews, "I Guess Work the Time Up" )

Derivative form plus prepackaged content would be entertainment. (B. Andrews, "Confidence Trick")

2003-05-06T08:31:00.000-07:00

call out the instigators
cause there's something in the air
we've got to get together
sooner or later
cause the revolution's here
and you know it's right
and you know that it's right

hand out the arms and ammo
we're gonna wrest our way
through here
we've got to get together
sooner or later
cause the revolution's here
and you know that it's right
you know that it's right

---- Thunderclap Newman

2003-05-06T08:27:00.000-07:00

"Only two paths stand open to mental research: aesthetics, and also political economy." (Mallarme)

2003-05-05T20:04:00.000-07:00

1.To love/ purely is/ to consent/ to distance,/ it is/ to adore/ the distance be/ -tween our-/ selves and/ that which/ we love.
2. It's like thinking how the world began.
3. Nothing is necessary, everything is needed.
4. By aesthetic, I mean responsive to the pattern which connects.... an aesthetic question: How are you related to this creature? What pattern connects you to it?
5. Not 'mere' sentiment.
6. Love: Reciprocal Love... plays with the unexpected in the ordinary, the imagination in the conventional, the faith in the doubt, the perception of the internal object in the external object.
7. "The love of a thing consists in the understanding of its perfections." (Spinoza).
8. What of imperfection?

2003-05-05T19:59:00.000-07:00

there can be no revolution without poetry
there can be no poetry without love

2003-05-05T19:55:00.000-07:00

Fuse, noun. 1. Any of various devices, as a tube, casing, cord, or the like, filled or impregnated with combustible matter, or a kind of detonator, by means of which an explosive charge is ignited, as in firing a canon, blasting, exploding a shell. Fuses may be classified according to the manner of ignition, as: chemical fuse, in which are brought together substances which by their chemical union produce ignition; concussion or percussion fuse, producing explosion by concussion; electric fuse, fired electrically; friction fuse, ignited by frictional heat; time fuse, arranged so as to fire the charge after a certain definite interval of time has elapsed. Fuses for projectiles are classified according to position, as base and point fuses. 2. In electricity, a wire, bar, or strip of fusable metal inserted for safety in an electric circuit. When the current is increased beyond a certain safe strength, the metal melts, interrupting the circuit.

Poet, noun. From the Greek poietes, poetes, maker, composer; French poiein, to make, do, create, compose; Sanskrit cinoti, one who gathers, heaps up, piles in order; Old Slavic, ciniti, to arrange.

2003-04-14T11:53:00.000-07:00

Writing articulates acts of attention. Through language, poetry constitutes it's object: in a literal sense, that which appears to the 'reader' (the 'writer,' in the first instance) as printed matter on a page or pixels on a screen. Conventional reading practices suggest an act of will may (must?) convert this initial sense impression into terms other than this (i.e., the words build a picture of 'reality' 'out there' (in the world) or 'in here' (w/in one's 'soul')). Such a scheme suggests display as the norm: of the exemplary individual delving into essential emotion (wherein the value of poetic language is it's authenticity), or of a generalizable persona portraying 'real-world life-situations' (wherein poetic language becomes simulacrum: not the event (or 'thing') itself, but it's poetic 'double'). Such display is conventionally grounded in a 'voice'. The syntax of this voice, in it's turn, is grounded in psychological depth, the limits of which, ironically, are constructed w/in the parameters of a grammar the rules of which are located elsewhere than in the body (of the speaking subject). When most clearly focused, my 'art' works to probe the interface between 'voice' and the apparatus by and through which that voice is constructed (in language) in and by the very real material processes of linguistic representation: structurally, how 'voice' is made sense (of)....

Poetry is the whole language art. Language is a system of signs and a code of conduct constituted essentially by & in the greatest technology yet produced by human culture: alphabets. Humans who may be thought to 'operate' such technologies may be said to read;thus, two key questions: what is it 'to read'? what can be read? To approach each question in the most 'radical' sense ---- essentially, to begin a process of recuperation (and generation) of reading 'values'. To ask not only in a psychological but a structural and cultural sense, 'Who 'reads'what & how? Whatdoes it mean to classify some work as 'poetry', some not? What are the investments such decisions imply? Who makes these decisions, howare they enacted, where are they codified, disseminated? Why the distinction between 'poetry' and 'not-poetry'? Is it sufficient to say, "poetry is the 'for-itself' and 'in-itself' of language? Can language be 'for-itself 'in-itself'? Or must a use be presumed, & thereby a user, & therewith a social context (discourse)? Finally, the crux: text and context, code & system. To make the enmeshing, the 'haeccity' of each of these plain: that is, to show them (at work, at play, to show their absence when necessary) & thereby to make palpable sense, make a value of (& in) it: to conclude: Artdoes not believe in the principle of equivalence: whither 'value' hence?

2003-04-13T22:57:00.000-07:00

".... it's all social commentary"....

fuse
1) the track of an animal;
2) tube, casing, etc., filled or saturated with combustible material, by means of which a shell or mine is ignited and exploded;
3) to make fluid by means of intense heat; to liquefy, melt;
4) of a flux; to facilitate the fusion of;
5) to blend intimately, amalgamate, unite into one whole, as by melting together;
6) liquefy, attenuate, thin;
7) of contiguous vessels, bones, etc. To coalesce.

organon
1) Gr. oryavov, instrument, bodily organ;
2) Aristotle: his "logical treatises" = "instrument" of all reasoning;
3) a bodily organ, as an instrument of the soul or mind;
4) an instrument of thought or knowledge; a means by which some process of reasoning, discovery, etc., is carried on, esp., a system of rules or principles of demonstration or investigation.

"The problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable ot place oneself within a 'we' in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts; or is it not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a 'we' possible?.... Because it seems to me that the 'we' must not be previous to question-(ing); it can only be the result -- and the necessarily temporary result -- of a question as it is posed in the new terms in which one formulates it."

"For me ideology is a kind of vast membrane enveloping everything. We have to know that this skin exists even if it encloses us like a net or like closed eyelids. We have to know that, to change the world, we must constantly try to scratch and tear it. We can never rip the whole thing off, but we must never let it stick or stop being suspicious of it. It grows back and you start again."

2003-04-13T22:46:00.000-07:00