Baudrillard/Future/Truth/Meaning/Real

By Wythe on January 5, 2012

From “Baudrillard in the 21st Century (and after)” by Dr. Gerry Coulter:

IV. Is Poststructuralism Forever?

One thing that is likely to advance Baudrillard’s writings further into the future is the seeming permanence in theory of what we might term a post structural condition. While some will continue to ignore the loss of faith in capital “T” Truth”, capital “M” Meaning, and a capital “R” Real, most theorists have come to accept that truth, meaning, and the real (and here we are especially indebted to Baudrillard), exist only as restricted (non universal) concepts which each of us encounter along our local and restricted horizons. In this, Baudrillard has contributed a series of concepts, as have other poststructuralist thinkers, which may well assure the permanence of their own relevance. From the most radical contemporary perspective it seems unlikely that we are to pass out of our post structural condition anytime soon. If we ever do pass beyond it then thinkers like Baudrillard will most likely lose a good deal of relevance. Still, the likes of Barthes and Baudrillard will probably be remembered for their place in advancing a position in response to 1) the intolerable state of affairs in their own time and, 2) a universe which is completely indifferent to humans and their thoughts.

I love every version of “Is X forever?” or “Are we going to be Y-ing forever?” These questions always get me, always force me to pause and think. (No, of course not; Cthulhu/et al will come to destroy us, or we will destroy ourselves, or the oil will rise up and finally consume our food–water base, long before. Universe = indifferent. Still, fun to ask.)

Questions of forever, esp. as re great thinkers, only highlight the problems of becoming-thinker. You can’t force yourself, despite craft and care, into the position of transdiscursivity, discourse-genesis, paradigm-shift. You can only do what you do, and do it well, and (key point) have fun! I honestly think Baudrillard had fun. But then, I’m a big fan of his, as well as Dr. Coulter’s. Good article.

Also, this one—”Jean Baudrillard’s Karl Marx – Productivist Ideology, And The Future of the Left”—is even better >>

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Our Next Observatory Show: LUNATION!

By Wythe on December 19, 2011

LUNATION: Art on the Moon
Observatory’s first group-curated show  •  January 7 – February 26, 2012

Opening Party: Saturday, January 7th, 7–10 PM, FREE

Artists and scientists have always been attracted to the moon…
Our closest celestial neighbor, the earth’s little sister, the moon creates the tides and illuminates the woods at night. For centuries, humanity believed the moon provided a key into the invisible realm: it called out the beast within us, freeing us to act as wolves, to run, to dance, to chant—and sometimes (as in Duncan Jones’ Moon) to split in two, to find our double, our changeling moon-self.

Is the moon home to life? Today we know it isn’t, but even as of 1830, speculation was rampant that the moon was inhabited by Christianized bat-people who worshiped in great ziggurats. (See The Sun and the Moon by Observatory alumnus Matthew Goodman for details.) Still, life comes to the moon. We know the moon contains frozen water, and we dream of using it as our jumping-off point for visiting even more alien vistas.

Down here, despite all the prowess and nuance of our latest telescopes, earthlings still look up naked-eyed with excitement at the full moon. Lovers and children gaze up at its slowly blinking façade in mute wonder. Artists portray the moon as a source of danger and power, and latter-day sorceresses and men of magic call up to that heavenly lamp, seeking to transcend the ordinary night. For them, the old myths have not changed so much: the moon is still a secret mirror, showing in pale light how the familiar contains always an element of the unexpected…

Artists Included

LUNATION Dates to Save:

  • Sat., Jan. 7 – LUNATION opening! Come drink wine with us and celebrate the many phases/faces of the moon—including ones you’ve never seen before
  • Sat., Jan. 22 – Moon Magick workshop presented by Pam Grossman of Phantasmaphile
  • Sat., Feb. 18 – 3rd Anniversary Observatory Fundraiser Party: Help support your favorite interdisciplinarian art, science, & occult event space!

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The Society Goeth… Elsewhere

By Wythe on November 8, 2011

We presented a short retrospective on the Society and fielded questions about our possible collaborations within Elsewhere. Ethan wore a helmet, just in case.

Elsewhere is a fantastic “living museum” in Greensboro, North Carolina, that Ethan and I have been invited to work with next spring. We recently went down to check it out, and here are just a few iPhone images (hopefully Ethan will supply much better photos soon) of the constantly morphing gallery-museum-organism that is Elsewhere. The space is absolutely amazing.

"The Alone Zone." Yes—it's a room eating a small house.

Every living museum needs a baby cyclone...

Chocolate distribution system, built in two days.

Trypophobia-inducing plush-toys-in-plush-seedpods tree.

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Lady Opportunity

By Wythe on October 6, 2011

After a discussion of “lady opportunities” (I forget what that meant at the time, exactly), Ethan wrote:

Also, “lady opportunity” is hipster code for receiving a clandestine message via pneumatic tube outside of the local microbrewery from the Jaguar Lady to don a peaked cap and American Apparel jodhpurs and meet at either the potash docks or the secret entrance behind the unwitting constabulary to receive coy glances, furtive glimpses of a silk kimono under a heavy greatcoat, and the promise of future canoodling in exchange for blueprints to planned Occidental megastructure-building apparatuses such as the Fabvershamsher Device.

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History Of The Grecian Urn, Abridged

By Wythe on October 6, 2011

Another strange history. This is from a severely backlogged project—I reread just the epigraphs the other day and was amazed how they told a story about the object in question, the urn. Thus, today, the Hollow Earth Society presents…

History of the Grecian Urn

Abridged

Ut urna poesis.

***

Severe contemplators, observing these lasting relicks,
may think them good monuments of persons past, little advantage to future beings;
and, considering that power which subdueth all things unto itself,
that can resume the scattered atoms, or identify out of anything,
conceive it superfluous to expect a resurrection out of relicks:
but the soul subsisting, other matter, clothed with due accidents,
may salve the individuality.
Yet the saints, we observe, arose from graves and monuments about the holy city.

—Sir Thomas Browne, 1658.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make…

—William Butler Yeats, 1928.

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

—A Grecian urn, via John Keats, 1819.

Being art, the urn retains its ability to “speak” to all who observe it,
reminding us of our paradoxical dilemma as mortals who exist in finite time.

—Dennis Dean, of Keats, 1997.

I am at first inclined to agree…
But on re-reading the whole Ode,
this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem,
and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it,
or that it is a statement which is untrue.

—Thomas Stearns Eliot, of Keats and his contemplators, 1929.

…Behind the official’s sedan chair as it hurries away
there arises from the already decomposed urn
someone high up who is arbitrarily endorsed
as ruler of the village.
I like almost anything that falls from the sky——Franz Kafka, 1917.

you know, snow, hail—
sleet even, when the sleet is mingled with very white snow.
Or anything that’s white.
Or duck eggs.

Or things that always give you a clean feeling, like
a new metal bowl,or an earthen pottery cup…

—Electra, via Charles Mee, 1992.

FIN.

 

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The Question Of New Media 2: Commodity And The Individual

By Wythe on October 3, 2011

II. Commodity and the individual

My man, philosopher Alain Badiou, is profoundly worried on just this point:  In an age of “Enlightened,” progressive, inclusive thinking, do we not simply turn each person into a new potential very special respected market?

Do we not say, if you are a sectarian with group X—any group—that we can now sell you your own image (coffee mugs of X, blog aggregators aggregating criticism around X, cable news shows gently mocking X, X events…)?  Maybe we do; maybe we have; maybe simulation and mass production have made this phenomenon more obvious or worse.

It is true that, in the Middle Ages, pilgrims didn’t necessarily buy the staff of the Crusader (the one “signed by the Cross,” lit., signed by the Sign…).  But still they had to acquire that identifying item, and of course the red cross itself, pinned to the clothing, and whatever national garb—certain pajamas for Bretons, others for Bulgars, still others for the Rhenish, &c.  They made identity choices before capitalism and before (for the most part) media.

What I mean is, have new media altered group identity?  Or, as with every other human process, made it more molecular?  It happens at a lower level.  We are told to identify at a lower level, at a constant level.  We are asked (we ask each others, we ask ourselves) to “update” our “statuses,” our identities, our consciousnesses, for all to see.

We are returning to an era of public consciousness, it is true.  But we are also moving into a new era of constant identity.  Identities can shift radically, so long as they are public.  The new media make this individuation of the identity both easy and “exciting,” meaning subtly mandatory; it is now odd (has the tinge of failed coup, failed elitist gambit, or counter-gambit) to deny real-synchronous “updating” in some format.

This leads to constant marketing—but constantly shifting marketing.  Marketing was always a step behind, in the old days, because it couldn’t necessarily get to you when you were open to being marketed to.  Now, as soon as you send an email about a pet dog, BOOM, marketing about dog food.  But you’re also more likely to have moved on, mentally, and the next word triggers the next BOOM, and the short bursts of marketing lag a step each behind the short bursts of your consciousness.

Again, more molecular—evenly so.  Capitalists and consumer–producers have the same set of tools.  We, in fact, now have the advantage in that we can be exposed to a limitless pool of stimuli, each of which drags in its wake a limitless but always insufficiently filtered (insufficiently supplying) market.

Again, the critic must know this and know it better than the capitalist.  She must abandon a politics that is limited to traditional markets.  Whether or not Badiou’s fears about the limits of liberal thought within capital are true, we have arrived at a new plateau and are not going backward.  Each person IS in fact a market.  The new and old media alike will attempt to make this work for their financiers.  (Are you a New Yorker kind of person?  Or more of a Vice?)

The critic must make a new, human politics out of the fact that the consumer, the artist, and the democrat have these same tools, so that new media is no more or less inherently evil or commodifying than old.  The critic must find the intersections between the media, old and new, the markets of the individual, and the individual’s sense of herself as a human.

And, finally, “old” but actually quite Modern fears of the public will be—must be, but will be—abandoned, and politics must reattach to art and media and life, so that we do not operate unconditionally, as robots in a world of provided roles, but as humans, who choose and discard identities and resist markets and, yes, probably, create markets all the time.  We must return to a public, political (“city,” lit.) world, and to a world of choice.  We return to Time itself—this time, armed with camera phones.

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Is Our Society “Secret?”

By Wythe on October 1, 2011

No. But it may be obscure.

“Obscure” means “covered over,” as in scutum (shield), and sky. Something is there, but you can’t see it. It implies darkness, indistinctness. Yet it is not ambiguous, vague, invisible, necessarily malicious, or even secret.

A seditious secret implies betrayal; something obscure can be merely not-known, or not-seen. The best place to hide information, after all, is in the open (“The Purloined Letter”).

So our Society traces back not to charlatans, mystagogues, and oracles, but to those most openly, outwardly seeking the obscure, turning the shields of nature and time over to inspect what lies beneath.

Openness in this way becomes itself obscure. Our great mystery is not that we are open and prone to opening, but that we are not couching our openness in conformity, on the one hand, or in mystery and religion, on the other.

Our obscurity is a shield, a badge. Those with us recognize it, a fellow-pilgrim’s staff digging into a weary road.

***

From The Correct & Truthsome History of the Hollow Earth Geographers’ Guild & Subsequent Operations Thereupon Founded:

The Society must look back to at best always-murky origins in the geometric horses and bulls of Lascaux, in the bull-jumping of Kreta, the proto-scientific astral rites of Lagash and Ur, and of the Maya ziggurats, and of a thousand hillsides lighted by a thousand fires…

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The Question Of New Media 1: Commodity And New Media

By Wythe on September 30, 2011

I. Commodity and new media

Why would the new media commodify as opposed to the old?  Why assume an inherent malice or even simply a tendency towards commodification in media of any type?  Does “media” imply “commodity?”  Can we use media to communicate without creating an opportunity for money to be exchanged, or for profit to break the essential circularity of the gift, of credit, of production–consumption?

Can’t I consume a YouTube video without buying anything?  Can’t I, in fact, consume more new media, more quickly, than I ever could consume old media, without paying a damn thing?  (And what is our definition of the “new media?”)  The internet, if anything, makes commodity infinitely mutable and often self-erasing.  (The internet, viewed one way, is money under erasure—commodity made “liquid” to the point of becoming gaseous, impossibly to contain.)

What about, say, the use of smoke signals to communicate?  Here we have an old medium that is difficult to commodify—a semi-public, visible assemblage used to communicate one-way, in bursts.  This sounds to me like the tweet.

Or take Tumblr—the unconscious of the internet.  What the hell is the point of 99.9% of the reblogging of bizarre but—I admit—absolutely indispensable phantasmagoria of Venn diagrams and high-art fashion photography and scans of out-of-print books and images of baby animals and porno (“whore writing,” lit.), ad infinitum, &c., &c.?

Here’s the essential first point:  The people generating what critics will examine in and via new media are not, for the most part, generating said content in hopes of commoditizing it.

It is true:  At some point in the life cycle of said content, it was created for a moneyed reason; some art photographer had hopes of making loot off of blurry heels and half-stockings and a parade of skinny women.  But then the art–commodity was repurposed, reinvigorated, made without-organs and without-faciality (without author, without pretense back to a “real” signified) by its use as a vessel for some new, almost unimaginably vague or juvenile or beautifully ambiguous (double-purposed, self-erasing) signification.  A picture of a heel, in Vogue, is old media, a commodity made and bought and sold and viewed along lines of moneys-spent, sexuality monetized.  The same picture on Tumblr has been freed of the money-lines and sent flying in a new direction.  (And what the hell does it mean?  We must decide.  We are each the critic when we view it…)

We must invest the new-media assemblage—in fact its whole frame, in fact ourselves—with a new politics, the politics of a new self, oriented suspiciously toward the simulating world of the internet but even more suspiciously toward (andso against) the world of the supposed real, which belongs on the one hand to the brutal violence of the lower brain and on the other hand to the financier, the psychopathic–vulpine capitalist.

Ultimately, insofar as criticism survives at all or is not democratized down to an unconscious, constant, molecular state (see: art production, distribution; novel-into-tweet, opus to bursts, Wagner to stillicide), the critic must become less concerned with the notion that “new media” platforms are simply somehow more insidious ways to capitalize on even younger, more “tuned in,” less “real” individuals.

The critic must adopt a new political stance in which the locus of the polis is not the “real” townhall but the digital one—not the thirty-second television spot (“I approved this message”), but the offhand remark caught by dozens of cameras and protected on Wikileaks.

Said again:  The place where politics happens has been democratized.  It is no longer the elitist law review or the good-ole-boy backroom:  It is Facebook.

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Imaginary Reading List: Archimboldi

By Wythe on September 29, 2011

Kindlifresser, an unfinished novella by Benno Von Archimboldi about the legendary “Child-Eater of Bern.”

Given up by the great author after page fifty due to a “geometrical uncertainty,” according to Archimboldi’s own faint marginalia. What the “uncertainty” was and why it prevented the completion of this compellingly horrifying fairy tale remain mysteries.

[The plot seems to revolve around a burgher who acts as a sort of detective in Bern—an unlucky man who, through various turns of fate, not only befriends the Child-Eater but marries him off to his own young daughter. It's not clear, as of page fifty, if the daughter will survive. The most engaging passage concerns the Child-Eater's small fortune, which his father or uncle (it's never clear) earned selling horses to rebels during the religious wars. The Child-Eater, who speaks very little and is not present in most scenes in the book, treats money both fetishistically and possessively, rarely allowing himself to spend even a pfennig. It's hinted that his obsession with the retention of his modest wealth started when he was a child and stole a sausage, and was made by his father or uncle to swallow the coin he could have borrowed to buy it, had he only asked.]

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Melancholy And Cowboys

By Wythe on September 28, 2011

Artist Tim Schwartz rocks.

A while back, he contacted me about participating in a project called Reimagining Wild Bill for which several writers were asked to fill in the missing page of a notable article—the 1867 Harper’s Monthly account of Wild Bill’s duel with Dave Tutt in Springfield, MO.

Says Schwartz: “Over the last number of years Harper’s has undertaken the task of digitizing all of their historical content. When this article was scanned into their system page 278 was skipped, leaving a gap in the digital version.” That’s where we came in.

We “reimagined” events but also distorted them, on purpose, and because we’re not great historians of the West—and even if we were…

Later, I saw that Tim had written an essay with “melancholy” in the title. Melancolia being one of my all-time favorite themes, I read it and was quite impressed. He captures clearly, in a short essay, a general sense that—thanks to technology and advertising and Marty McFly and so on—”the future… is now!” and has been for a while.

From “Loss, Meaning and Melancholy” (my emphasis):

In much the same way, our future has already been displayed to us and internalized. As Peter Lunenfeld (2005) suggests in User, the twentieth century constructed images of the future through film, comics, and other types of popular culture in the form of science fiction. This future was constructed out of techno-mechanical ideals that now dictate how we envision the future. These possible futures have become archived in the digital world and have become complicit in the present. This creates a future that is impossible to escape. Our futures can only be envisioned in response to the futures that were previously imagined. Essentially the future has already happened and is now part of our past, leaving us in a permanent present. Both the past and future have been archived in the digital world and now we stand in the present moment that is automatically being absorbed into the system.

Melancholia, chillaxin. In a sad way.

This resonated with what Ethan and I wrote for the RETROFUTUROLOGY show, and it resonantes even more reading it again, having read Cyclonopedia and thought a lot about complicity lately.

With our archives (of signs) surrounding us, reminding us of what the world/future/humanity “should look like,” are we free to dream of a new world/can we still live the world in a naïve way?

If not, I fear there are going to be only more and more melancholy cowboys. Not merely sad (“I can’t ride the open range”), but melancholy. Obsessively mournful despite the lack of specific object to mourn. The world is still there; the future is still ahead of us. But our relationship to its world-ness has changed in some fundamental way.

“Our futures can only be envisioned in response to the futures that were previously imagined.” We can ride off into the sunset (that’s a convention everyone understands), but we can no longer “ride off into the sunset” metaphorically, in some new unexpected direction.

Or can we?  Comments welcome.

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