square white world

Joe Milutis: Let’s stick with Bergson and the virtual on this notion
of history. It’s really very simple. If I’m on a bus, and everything
is going OK, I caught it on time, the sun is flickering by, so I know
that once I get off the bus there will be no adversity in getting to
my destination. I have the leisure to read, to think, and to
effectively remove myself from the situation of my actual presence in
the bus. In fact, if I want, I can see the bus better, choosing to
move from my reflections, to the faces of the other passengers, to
the people on the street moving by, sometimes slow, sometimes fast,
like a passage of music. It is all very nice. Now, same bus: I’m
late, it’s raining. The bus will take the same amount of time to get
to my destination. However, now I can’t read. I’m on the edge of my
seat scrolling through multiple mental scenarios of what’s going to
happen as soon as I get off the bus: how I will manage the small
window I have to get to my destination without total failure, what
are the most effective scenarios (quickly dwindling) and how, in the
face of failure, will I reassess the value of the idea I had of
“getting there on time.”

Travel in space is the same as moving through intellectual data; and
this is not a metaphor, it is literally one and the same. You need to
know when to kick in the scenario-creating-mind, which is important!
It’s not just a rainy day drag! Conversely, you need to know when to
dream and relax the mind, so that virtual images come in. Are you
completely caught up in the labyrinths of self-referentiality or
buried by a responsibility to the past? Or is your work drained of
depth since you’ve molded your intellectual output on the buzz du
jour? For me, I don’t want my intellectual life dominated by the
“constant revolutionizing of production,” although I find that it can
be exciting to tap a particularly energetic flow, since I don’t feel
satisfied by my research until it finds a way outside of itself. Do I
have more place in my heart for the untimely rather than the timely?

…

The academic is untimely. That is the strength of this particular endeavor,
don’t mess with it.

- quoted from CTheory, full text here

What some would call the death of the political is only the birth of a new world and new politics: the success of the 1970s reaction and the appearance of a “No Future” tendency linked to the creation of an Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) that neatly slices up the planet. With the IWC, individuals are all the more subjected since they cannot localise power. The world market is presented as an efficient instrument for putting poverty into a “grid” and “enmeshing” marginalisation. Despite the global grid overlaying the social universe, the revolution and hence hope are not things of the past.

- François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman, Columbia University Press, New York, 2010, p. 299

As Foucault had sketched it out, power is everywhere and first of all in us. We must “make do with it.”

- Ibid., pp. 299-300

“The decision comes also in consideration of the fact that Ai has repeatedly said he is willing to pay the taxes he evaded, police said.”

“The Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd, a company Ai controlled, was found to have evaded a huge amount of taxes and intentionally destroyed accounting documents, police said.”

- from here and here and here

- SCOTT WALKER – WORLD PREMIERE OF NEW SCOTT WALKER SCORE TONIGHT; EXCERPT POSTED ONLINE

In advance of tonight’s world premiere of a new Scott Walker score, an excerpt has been posted online.

Appearing as part of a larger piece for Duet For One (a reimagination of Jean Cocteau’s famed monologue Duet For One Voice), the excerpt can now be heard at the foot of the page.

Full information for the run of performances at the Linbury Studio Theatre in London can be found below.

There are currently no plans for this score to be released commercially.

- according to Ji Ruan – who reserves some rights over this photograph, if not the graffito – all over Hong Kong: Who’s afraid of Ai Weiwei / 谁在害怕艾未未

Calin Dan writes [Spectre, 16/04/11]: “why on earth do we need a celebrity to have problems in order to begin looking in the direction of a country that rolls over practically ALL of our standards concerning individual affirmation, freedom of speech and information, protection of the environment, free affirmation of ethnic and religious identity?”

He calls his commitment to political activism personal, saying, “If you don’t speak out, if you don’t clear your mind, who are you?” And his mother’s proud of him.

Ai Wei-wei: You can’t just say that the system is flawed, you have to work through the system and show it in all of its detail and that’s the only way that you can ultimately make a critique.

Ai Wei-wei declared the Communist Party’s demolition of his new Shang-hai studio complex, which he filmed and broadcast live online – the studios had taken him two years to build – to be one of his most powerful artworks ever.

Do ever examine yourself to see why is it that you are so fearless compared to other people?

Ai Wei-wei: I am so fearful. That’s not fearless. I’m more fearful than other people, maybe. Then I act more brave, because I know the danger is really there. If you don’t act, the danger becomes stronger.

The case of Ai Wei-wei is simply not relevant to New Zealanders; the fate of Ai Wei-wei is just not relevant for New Zealanders:

- Leigh Davis, Stunning debut of the repairing of a life, Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2010

- Ibid., 27:I

- Ibid., 36:I

- Ibid., 37:I

- Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

- Ai Weiwei, Dropping, 2010

- Ai Weiwei, White House, 1999

Like Ai Weiwei, his 2010 work, Missing, a rollcall of the dead in the Sichuan earthquake lasting three and a half hours, seems to be missing.