square white world

It is the desire to occupy a place from which one can take everything in, first and foremost visually, but also orally and audibly, that renders the theatre and theatricality so suspect.

- Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium, Fordham University Press, New York, 2004, p. 7

Samuel Weber calls Plato’s ‘cave’ in The Republic a theatre. He calls for a mediumistic interpretation of theatricality. I would rather consider the cave in Plato’s story theatrical on the basis of its exaggeration, its blatant artificiality. Theatricality, then, is problematic for being artificial by nature, rather than suspect for interesting us in its panoptic potential. This view of theatre includes the impression it gives of potentially showing everything and when Weber calls on Walter Benjamin’s notion of allegory to attest to the extra, the remainder, of what is in excess of the signifying system or regime installed by theatricality, he is sensitive to what I would more readily like to call exaggeration.

If Plato’s theatricality is not in the image he has chosen but first and foremost in his choice of adding a theatrical dimension, what we have in the ‘cave’ is indeed theatre by way of metaphor. The thought behind it has chosen a theatrical metaphor and done so not to express a theatrical truth or truth about theatre and its placing and setting of us up to see, hear and taste (? Weber writes ‘orally’) everything but to stage a truth about everything or set up a theatrical stage in order for that truth to be represented: the theatrical is constituted here by its metaphoricity. I would prefer to contrast this metaphoricity of the thought as it is theatricalised and/or performed with a theatricality particular in every instance of performance, a theatricality, that is, of theatre as it is thought. The theatre of thought depends on a generality, that supplied by metaphoricity. The thought of theatre is used to find a way to express and analyse the problematic natural artificiality we call theatricality.

As a note further on this line: I was reminded of the difference and the difference in relation to difference of theatricality and metaphoricity watching a DVD of Kraftwerk’s Minimum-Maximum. This is Kraftwerk in performance - which means doing not much apart from standing in a row in front of identical keyboards… while behind them a three-part screen explodes with all sorts, carefully contrived and often synched up with the songs, of graphic illustration.

I was struck by how innately theatrical the machine is. And it is so without speaking of our desire to see, hear, touch, taste, experience everything through our senses. It’s not its prosthetic McCluhan dimension that makes the machine dynamically theatrical, it is its strong artificiality. And this is where the risk lies, the danger: machines are sexy and dangerous. If they are prosthetic, the danger appears to lie in their exaggeration of single qualities, speed for example, strength, tele-vision. That they are machines makes them theatrical. Machines stage their own risky qualities. They make what they do obvious. They exaggerate. And this constitutes their appeal.

Machine designs are often said to be ‘revolutionary.’ I don’t think this is an entirely baseless description but applies less to the superfices of the machine than to its artifice: what it does AND what it stages. The delicious threat of being replaced or degraded by or upgraded to a machine exists and is compelling because robots are to the nth degree not us. The Big Other is a robot. We are literally upstaged by robots. Which is why robots are the future. (& Crime Oil - which is a trademark: contact for your order now.)

From the more limited point of view of metaphoricity, machines virtualise, become virtual, in the sense of virtual reality. They are put to work at creating a moral image, much like the ‘cave’’s use of a theatrical metaphor. Virtual reality is only sexy and dangerous to the extent that the artifice is highlighted, that it exaggerates us, itself or not us. The appeal of Second Life appears to lie directly in this performative dimension of prostheses or body modification. And the appeal of talking about Second Life or the immersive experience appears to have more to do with real-world implications on the nexus between artifice and nature, which is exactly that realm opened up, I would suggest, by the problematic of theatricality. In other words, our self-performance in virtual reality really really happens. It is exaggerated and signposts its artificiality. It takes place not within theatricality as a medium but theatricality as a problematic field.

go here for the source of the quote in the title. The virtual in the event of no difference being possible any more between it and the real signifies a totalization of the Image such that you get when code meets its nemesis: and there is a phase-shift; and code and encounter can’t be different any more.

‘Real’ in the event of reality not allowing a difference between the virtual and real world must however belong to the present which was. Or … the virtual world will not allow reality to differ from it at some point in the past.

This amounts to a prohibition on division or on decomplexification (to hold up against the prohibition on multiplication, the unnecessary creation of figures, characters, supernumeraries).

The real world was irreducible to the virtual because it was not after all virtual.

Then there was the law against reduction, pure and simple. And the incentivization of adding dimensions, to n-set.

With the proviso that we never arrived at the particular.

If I could articulate it, the thesis of the proposed dissertation on Deleuze and theatre, it would include my frustration at not being able to make the work I want to, to work with the people I want to and to command the resources, at a global level if you want, I need to do so. It would be a complaint, in the old sense. The thesis would howl. And it would bay at the moon who remains out of reach.

I must come back to Constantine Cavafy’s ‘The Windows:’

In these dark rooms where I live out empty days,
I wander round and round trying to find the windows.
But the windows are not to be found -
or at least I can’t find them. And perhaps
it is better that way.
Perhaps the light will prove another tyranny.
Who knows what new things it will expose?

- photos by Duane Michals of the actor Joel Grey, a friend of the photographer, playing the poet, inspired by the writings of Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933)

A final note: a modernist poetics has haunted these thoughts on “Digital Maoism” and limited its responsibility to complete clarity. Plaguology is of the same coinage as the poetics of a “terrible beauty.” The latter need not only describe the beauty of terror. It is indeed in excess. It might also figure the displacement of beauty onto terror and prefigure the way in which capital may in turn displace or may already have displaced onto terror in the circulation of fear: the overturn of capitalism into worldwide terrorism and the concomitant culture and currency of fear. These remain questions of aesthetics. As Michel Foucault enjoins, know how what is made was made so that it can be unmade.

- my corpocracy and plaguology]

… the history of depths begins with what is most terrifying: it begins with the theatre of terror whose unforgettable picture Melanie Klein painted. In it, the nursing infant is, beginning with his or her first year, stage, actor, and drama, at once. Orality, mouth, and breast are initially bottomless depths. Not only are the breast and the entire body of the mother split apart into a good and a bad object, but they are aggressively emptied, slashed to pieces, broken into crumbs and alimentary morsels. The introjection of these partial objects into the body of the infant is accompanied by a projection of aggressiveness onto these external objects, and by a re-projection of these objects into the maternal body. … We call this world of introjected and projected, alimentary and excremental partial internal objects the world of simulacra. Melanie Klein describes it as the paranoid-schizoid position of the child. It is succeeded by a depressive position which characterises a dual progress, since the child strives to reconstitute a complete good object and to identify himself with this object.

- Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 215

We will justify the clinical term with an outward-looking - yes, RJF looked inward - and critical engagement with the disease. The disease is terror and terror as the current rule of the spectacle, of representation. …

This would beat the Invisible Theatre we have now. Tom said, Stage an invisible play. Thing is the play’s in progress. And we are invisible. To become visible we need the sell. To sell we need the spectacle. To represent or reprazent we need terror. So a terror-cell to sell theatre. We will come out and with us out the truth, the error of representation, the deathwish in it, the disease. In it of it … in the middle of it! We have to represent as the violence in the middle of the representation. A theatre of morsels. A feedback from the guts of the audience to the matrix of the spectacular terror inside representation. The cathode-ray nipple as Franti had it in the good old days of Hiphoprisy is attached to a breast to which belongs the urethral and anal sadism of Klein’s maternal, matricial theatre, the matrix itself.

- my T-CELL: a terrorist performancell

Olkowski provides a possible way of thinking theatre with Deleuze: the ‘theatre of terror.’ She explicitly connects Melanie Klein’s ‘theatre of terror,’ in Deleuze’s reading of it, and Antonin Artaud’s ‘theatre of cruelty.’ [Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, Dorothea Olkowski, Uni. of California Press, London, 1999, pp. 182-189]

- my T-Cell: draft project proposal

Rending the maternal body into fragments, the suckling infant consumes and introjects these morsels, investing them with an infantile but, for that, nonetheless sadistic rage. The pieces of the mother’s body become poisonous little breasts.

The infant squirts mother back at mother in a urinous flood: the child liquefies its mother, first directing the flow against the breast. In this interchange of flows, the suckling’s feedback contravenes the energetic law which constrains output never to exceed input. Mother and child concur in a feedback loop which is also a credit bubble. …

Olkowski desublimates representation, showing representation to be homologous with this [Aristotelian] view of substance: insofar that substance is presumed to be the guarantor, to ground and govern the continuity of the “sensible intuition,” of phenomena, organising, distributing, categorising. This work of stratifying and freezing in the privileged state of being, stating, or representing, is undertaken with the insistence of the same, the same substance, which, in what is smaller, partitioned and further partitioned, the being of substance equivocates. …

As Aristotelian substance is just like representation, according to Olkowski, so Platonic Ideas impose representative standards upon the pure form of time and ‘death.’ The latter is understood to crack the subject open to the form of time, which is pure flow: on one side of the crack, the ‘I’ who acts; on the other, the ‘me’ who is acted upon, asujetti, subject-ed. …

Olkowski brings in Deleuze’s take on Klein’s ‘theatre of terror’ to witness the ruin of theatre. She introduces Artaud to witness the ruin of theatre as a form of representation. Her use of Artaud differs radically from Deleuze’s recontextualization, since for the latter, Artaud is the epitome of a schizophrenic writer, not a ‘man of the theatre [or of cruelty]‘ at all. We would not sacrifice a single page of Artaud for Lewis Carroll’s entire literary output, says Deleuze.

Olkowski’s observations following these remarks about Artaudian theatre suggest little experience of contemporary theatre practice, which is as traditionally a ‘theatre of cruelty’ as one of ‘poverty’ or Aeschylus’s or Shakespeare’s: the whole tradition is transformed in Artaud’s theatre (in the past that’s never been present), but it is decisively there - where, as I’ve indicated, Olkowski situates it. …

… representation is already … complicated and resonates in series with the spectacle and, therefore, with terror: a complication with capital, a capital C. …

My affinity … for Olkowski’s work has to do with her problems of which, in The Ruin of Representation, and why I picked up the book in the first place, representation is clearly one. She is attracted to Deleuze, as I am, for the reason that in his philosophy there might be a before/between/meanwhile to representation that is at the same time able to be conceived and brought to consciousness, that language need not be the only theatre of operations for philosophy.

Her problem, again where I concur, is that of affirmation: how make it without making it stand in a relation of opposition, to critique, to the negative; how affirm representation or not disavow it, when the problem of representation, like death, consists in its indifference. Anne Carson, I believe, poses to this dilemma the question of the double negative, as does Slavoj Zizek, by imposition, in his thematization of negative disavowal: it’s not not to judge/critique/oppose/negate or judge/affirm but to suspend such judgement in time.

- my notes on Dorothea Olkowski’s Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, the section entitled, “The Theatre of Terror”

The aesthetics of consumerism are not foisted upon us; they emerge out of a rich and imaginative collaboration between the forces of capitalism and our own fears and desires. If there is kitsch in our daily lives, it is because there is kitsch in our minds.

- Daniel Harris quoted in Jonathan Kalb, Play by Play: Theatre Essays & Reviews, 1993-2002, Limelight Editions, New York, 2003, p. 113 (full quote here)

- Recorded during his exile in London by Caetano Veloso. Veloso was jailed in Brazil for his participation in the cultural movement of protest, which was called Tropicalia, against the military regime. Let this music, from the album A Little More Blue, serve as soundtrack for the posts to follow.

- listen to Kathryn Ryan interviewing John Key by tapping the hand that takes, National - your freedom

Ozchralians shouldun be bailed ou’ by Nyu Zillindaz - however we can allegedly afford to carry on with gross liability to the bankers of oz, liability on such a scale - a potential indebtedness exceeding three times the value of the NZ economy - that at worst is a threat to our sovereignty and that at best compromises it.

We’re nod sellin’ enny asseds akshurely… [Key titters]

Oy godda look Nyu Zillannaz in th’ oy … Oy godda sleep in the bed, oy godda look in tha mirror… - a good working relationship with the Maori Party. (Albeit that they set their bottom line and then two days later they change it, says Key: a partnership based on mutual respect?)

Oy’ve god ass strong s[e]nse of bellince…

Are you a manager? asks Kathryn. …

That’s a bank, not a country, says Kathryn.

I was talking to Mike today and he was talking about the charge made against the interweb that whereas film - as a distinct medium - was scaring the shit out of people by making them think the train was going to come out of the screen and run them down, here we have vidlets of kittens falling down stairs on YouTube (see for example, Pingu: “I am a five week old kitten and I am very cute”). The web has produced nothing worthy of note.

I said part of the problem was that our ability to use what we see represented is disabled, that there are cultural-historical reasons for this. Harold Bloom counted the 20th C. as belonging to Romanticism because the notion of belatedness yet prevails, the idea that it’s too late, we’re too late, it’s all done. We wallow, I said, wallow in the profundity of our belatedness.

The other part of the problem is that we see the interweb in an ‘archive fever’ as a place where you can watch Carmelo Bene, although he’s dead, or Artaud, dead culture, or colonial culture, or despotic totalising culture, dead also, or kittens falling down stairs, as a museum-mausoleum.

We talked about the contrast with the music of Caetano Veloso and Tom Ze and Carlinhos Brown, and Toumani Diabate and Ali Farka Toure, to name some non-tropicalismo musos, and there are the latter discussing 400 year-old tunes, and playing them, respectfully but using what they have. Getting the old bones out and shaking them around.

We agreed that they have a different attitude. Brazilian audiences go to music shows with instruments, guitars, to heavy metal bands with electric guitars, to jam along with their favourite artists. There’s more to this than interaction or participation: the music is alive.

It’s not a dead thing in a dead frame on a dead stage on a dead TV. There’s life in front of you and you pick it up and use it. And imitation remains the sincerest form of flattery.

In other words, our - the immediate our, the our we saw around us - our reverence towards what happens on stage on TV on film in music on the wall in a painting and so on differs from our reverence for the dead only in its externals. Inside we may be as pleased to put somebody in a box as to see them on the box.

…

Imagine a big box and this box is big enough to fit everything. You can put everything in it. And you’re running all over the place grabbing stuff and putting it in the box. And you’re buying crap to chuck in. And every holiday and friendship goes in the box. Every thought and poem and just everything.

- House on Fire with Smoke, 2007, image courtesy Blane de St. Croix

And the house is on fire.

And in the same sense you’re preserving the body through the rituals of health. You’re making it into its own big box. You’re preserving its death inside it.

I noted that the problem of things on the net or web is not that they’re not real, it’s that they are.

… the above-named today turned down my application for a a grant to write Love Project 9.

I am a victim of hope: a year’s worth of planning and preparation … not the entirety pinned on this one funding round but … enough riding on it as a source of legitimation, for the work done and that projected, to lead me to wonder and to be amazed and to ask those charges that the roots of failure lie in my suppression of good will, my critical disavowal, my judgemental and cynical negativity be dropped once and for all … since this has been the year to change my heart: I have examined it for duplicitous emotion; I have chased out the traitors and with the thieves I’ve wished for only good … The bars of the cage that held me back from achieving success weren’t real but they may as well have been.

To those who wrote in support or agreed to be named in the application to Creative New Zealand for funding, sorry. And thank you. But, sorry.

- O my poor heart … will lead you to the body of the project application. I look forward to your suggestion,should you find here something worth resurrecting.

Cath Cardiff, Manager, Arts Development writes:

Your application to the July-October 2008 funding round has been considered by the Arts Board of Creative New Zealand. We [sic] regret to inform you that this proposal has been declined for funding.

The Arts Board made funding decisions based on artistic merit and strategic priorities informed by recommendations from independent assessment committees in literature, visual arts, craft/object art, music, dance, theatre and festivals. [really] A list of the committees …

As usual the funds in this round were highly contested by a large quantity and diverse range of proposals. For project funding this round the Arts Board received 422 applications seeking $9.8 million. [sic] A total of $3,796, 196 was offered to 151 projects. The Theatre Committee assessed 61 applications, requesting $2,218,999. $860,260 was offered [really] to support 22 projects. A full list of the … approvals … our website …

Information about common issues [!] with project funding applications is available on our website http://www.creativenz.govt.nz/files/common-issues [sic - because address inoperative] …

Yours sincerely

…