{ Monthly Archives }
March 2007
feeding the fantasy, Japanese schoolgirls in so short skirts swarm on St. Luke’s Mall, 26/3 – thinking about the word “thwarted”
they showed bulldozers ploughing the bodies … and I said, "Where were the girlz when this was happening?" and she said … "They were watching." …
It turns us on when you fight … We get off on it. It’s OK with us if you don’t give head or haven’t historically – we don’t need orgasms as much as we need wars. Otherwise why would you guys be fighting them?
After WWII the Allies tried a bunch of Japanese bigchiefs on the grounds that even if they didn’t perpetrate the atrocities directly, they were part of a giant fascist machine, a giant human meat-grinder and they were to blame. Actually, the Allies put the entire Japanese Imperial culture on trial in a certain sense. But how come nobody tried the women? I don’t mean the comfort women who were literally captives, I mean the ones who made tea for the guys who ordered the rape of Nanking.
We’re the engines of life. We’re it. And men think we’re their victims. How did that happen?
Are we really that sneaky?
& could we get away with this forever?
– Tricia Sullivan, Maul, (Night Shade Books, 2006, p. 5)
rule of engagement, three: Borat
When is Borat like Jackass? When is Borat not like Jackass? Playing psychological chicken. Red lights mounted on the front of the Valiant. The actor pushes to the limit identification with a character.
What limit? Extreme acting. It makes me tired.
To what avail? The redneck will no more see himself in the actor than the actor sees himself in the redneck.
(The repeated – funny – fallacy of recognition/representation, repressed; in additional material returning: "cheese," "cheese," "also cheese," "cheese also" – the meth, the P of a sleepless tropism. Chora…
(You can’t.
(Cry: –
(They/it know/s you are wrong. That’s their superiority. Its superiority.
(Your superiority consists in that you recognise their/its exclusion of you. You include it.
(Is that really nothing?
(Tragic. Funny.
(When you look at it, …when you stare into it… and it stares back at you?
(I can see it/them. But it/they can’t see me. I am a victim of it/them not seeing me.)
There are American fans. There is Spinoza. There are women who want to be caged. And there is the language of appropriation. Jews somewhere celebrate history.
filmcomment remarked that Borat was a testament to American neighbourliness. Invite the stranger in. Be generous, classically. The myth.
There is always that figure, that fuck-up, at the party of younger people, who wants to break you by giving you harder drugs. I am the drug.
Take me.
(They/it swarm/s.)
rule of engagement, two: Max Black by Heiner Goebbels and Andre Wilms, the Maidment Theatre, Auckland, 23 March, 2007
An image is an action. That would immediately be enough to clarify an image in poetry – an action of language on language – and how poetry overcomes the limits of language by ingestion, by eating (see the page corpocracy and plaguology). But in Heiner Goebbels’s Max Black with Andre Wilms an action is first a meaning.
What is an illogical action? Not one that doesn’t have a sense. It’s too late. The sense has already happened. It was in the action. A logic of actions proceeds from the joy Andre Wilms has in performing them, that is, from our projected enjoyment, watching the actor. We want him to have enjoyed making sense.
Deleuze, in The Logic of Sense, seems to say that that sense is incorporeal. But on the stage in front of us, Andre Wilms incarnates sense, corporeally. His performance speaks actions and assigns to them meanings, before it addresses itself to language. Although the textual sources for this piece of theatre include Ludwig Wittgenstein, along with Paul Valery, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Max Black.
The game, no doubt, has its logic. All games do, just as all instruments have voices. So you could say the illogical falls into the class of the game. However, if it is here rather as an action game or, better, a musical action game, than as a language game (but aren’t all games made up of actions?), then the illogic will go to what is said and spoken. But this will already assume a logic, underlying, of the game of theatre.
Of course, time decides. It doesn’t decide outcomes. It decides wins and losses. And this within the logic of the game, absolutely. (Although the absolute comprises outcomes which are supposed to go beyond the game, you wouldn’t want to relativise your wins and losses.) Time is musical. Igor Stravinsky said something like music is the best means we have of passing time. Or was it marking time? And that would necessarily entail cheating time. Winning. We win just by standing on the other side of art and, as they say, cashing in our chips.
An actor is illogical, an actor in the theatrical sense and an actor in the broadest possible sense of that which produces effects. We are not dazzled by effects. We are impressed by precision. The affect of the actor is all too readily subsumed under character and relativised by drama and passed judgement on by story. Or history. The empty actor does not exist, although science might propose to the contrary.
How does Max Black work? By showing what science proposes to the contrary. By musicalising time. And by showing how this is done. You could say this is a shallow cheat, seeing how it shows its hand. But then you are forgetting the actor.
Language remains. It remains, in fact, largely misunderstood. Not a situation you’d wish to exacerbate. That is why we engage ourselves so radically. Yet here we have it and only a voice allows you to do it: bodying forth all these words that say nothing – with one hundred percent seriousness – in order that we mean something – with a sense of humour which exceeds that one hundred percent.
Tags: www.heinergoebbels.com
rule of engagement, one
the goal of the “great organisation” isn’t to obtain power or money or to impose some idea – the three forms of which history offers examples in such abundance. The goal is to arrest the innocent and then to punish them. The goal is punishment for its own sake, a self-sufficient activity, like art. And recognisable by the splendour of its “senselessness.”
– Roberto Calasso (in K., trans. by Geoffrey Brock, Random House, N.Y., 2005, p. 220)
Even when the executioners and the condemned man join forces, the victim’s position remains “implausible.”
– Roberto Calasso (in K., p. 229)
Jean Baudrillard, 1929-2007
A silence is observed
To hide its fact.
Jean Baudrillard
&
Captain America
Dead
In the same week.
(see page: Grosser Appell; see post below: corpocracy and plaguology: some thoughts on “Digital Maoism”)