May 2012

Not this time I

The weightless singularity does not presuppose any sense, nor does it discover any sense through its experience in the world.

Sense unfolds as creation, as a connecting desire, as the delirium that illuminates the event.

 

For the members of the virtual class, who produce value by investing their cognitive labour, mental suffering is a sort of professional illness that is being cured with psychopharmacological means, tools of quick intervention aimed at restoring productivity of the mind. For the residual population excluded from the virtual circuit, psychophathology then becomes the new condition of normality: an aggressive normality, of which integralism, nationalism and conformism are common manifestations.

– Franco Berardi (Bifo), pp. 114-116

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network critical
pique-assiettes

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false effort

So much of the performance of conventional NZ masculinity – what it means to be a man – can be summed up as false effort. The voice lowers, even to shuddering in its lowest registers. Speech is halting. It is a machine that stalls, turns over, starts up again with a cough, with the threat that at any time it might stop altogether. And have to get taken to the shop.

Grunts and inarticulate expressions of effort make their way into even the most mundane exchanges. “Good aaah morning.” The impression being given and the truth that men are seeking to give out is that it’s hard being a man, as Lou Reed sings in the VU song: “living in ahhh a trash can / my baby calls me aaahh up / she tries to hit me with thuh ahh mop / I can’t stand it any more”…

The attitude of false effort contrasts with the suavity, fluency and cool of, for example, Italian men, who become suspect for the very reason of their ease of attitude, their panache, why worry? even when it’s all front. Perhaps all the more when it’s all front. Staying cool in any situation, taking little sips, rather than draining the can dry, is suspiciously artificial. It goes against male appetitiveness and competitiveness. Whereas if the appearance is that effort is required, it must somehow be justified and it justifies: it self-legitimates. A long pull on a cigarette – when they were more fashionable – or a long and antisocial draining of the jug in one continuous adam’s apple bobbing draft followed by Aaaahhhh! as much meant to convey satisfaction – mock – as effort – false.

Ease is unknown to the man who practices false effort. A man who is unburdened, unharried by this sense of masculinity as a crushingly manual undertaking is a faggot, poof, or foreign. Ironic then that the grunts and sighs and huh-huh-huhs of false effort resemble so closely a gay porn soundtrack. But then, sex is honest work and hard. Or ought to be.

For the opposite sex to indulge in false effort is called faking. In fact, you might say that NZ women have to apply themselves to a greater degree to the production of an easy attitude by way of compensation. They must at all times be fluid, smooth, and are subject at all times to admonitions not to be uptight, go with the flow, calm down, when it is NZ men who are semi- or pseudo-hysterically giving birth (or doing poohs) at regular intervals, Aaaahhhh! Women are sweepers, minimisers, cleaner-uppers. They clear the stage of obstacles just so that their men may make the most mountainous of the dust motes which remain. They are expected so to do.

What makes it so difficult being a man in NZ? The answer would be the same for most women: other men/women. Albeit that women show their superiority in what they are prepared to tolerate. And then bitch in the background clique.

False effort is never found at more concentrated levels as where men meet, professionals, labourers alike, the residues of our once egalitarian society. With the gentrification of the pub, NZ men constitute a floating diaspora. Myth says it is the barbeque, around the grill. But high levels of false effort can be encountered in a phonecall. Ending with the obligatory and often uncomfortable – perforce – Cheers!

Commentators have suggested that male reticence – deeper underlying sensitivity which cannot bring itself to expression – causes the sentences of the NZ male to stumble and sigh and fart and groan and… pause. Before coughing, or laughing. For no apparent reason than the noise. If this were the case, the cause, then men are clearly more sensitive and show greater sensitivity to members of their own sex among whom they play out the routines of reticence – often passing the point of caricature – than to the opposite one.

NZ men are sensitive to the needs of women to make them feel more comfortable, safer and more it ease, just so they may be affirmed in being uneasy, uncomfortable and unsafe, and protest all the louder at the unfairness, the hardness of their lots, their jobs, their lives, at the shit they have to deal with. And their fear. NZ men are sensitive to the needs of women to have babies and therefore baby them. After all, it’s aaaaaahhhh hard being a man.

I have focused on speech, because I came off a phonecall – to another man, of course – where I realised I had slipped into vocal false effort, but I think false effort can be extended, as an ontological category, or style of being, to dress and other technologies of the self. Sartorial false effort can be considered like Chanel’s recommendation to dress and accessorise completely in character and when perfect to take away one element. But the other way around: to take away every element characteristic of style or a style and add one thing it is too hard to do without.

The man who moves easily is less than a man. He should never look too comfortable in his skin as in his clothes. The NZ man is most natural when dressed in nothing more than his comforter. So long it remains clear he is uncomfortable there is no affectation. Afraid of ease, he should never be afraid of his own fear and therefore wear whatever fear dictates, camo gear, for example.

croydon
detraque
enomy
N-exile
National Scandal
textatics
theatricality

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from island to volcano

unyielding insularity takes itself to
the arena of its own closure, the quasi-incantatory expending of the ‘I’ towards the
crossroads of its own necessary undoing, an over-exhaustion of the Self to the point of its
irrelevance, its self-excising, its reflexive desolation. Moreover, annihilation would by right
represent the most volatile engagement with sacrifice by virtue of conjecturing a province of
consciousness that executes its own fragmentation, seizing upon the force of self-destruction
so as to renovate terminality not as a distanced and alien negativity but as an invariably
creative manifestation of the desire for ungoverned cessation/resurgence. In this sense, the
transition to the chaotic via annihilative subjectivity would also drastically reconfigure the
concept of finality, wrenching it away from its conventional standing as a ruinous juncture of
the mortal condition, an inevitable descent towards nothingness, and instead casting it into
the dynamic region of a becoming. Beholden to a performativity that extends beyond the
abstractions of idealism and transcendentalism, the unreality of annihilative subjectivity, in its
accelerated open-endedness, in its eternal ambiguity, can then convert itself into the very
hallmark of existential resistance, the site of an ultimate confrontation with the ordered, self­
devastation now a battlefield upon which consciousness orchestrates its own erosion as an
act of cataclysmic transgression. In consideration of this combative stance, the assertion will
be advanced that such an unmediated experience of the end projects consciousness into an
unruly sphere of suspension whereby its own fading enjoins an irreparable blurring of the
demarcation between possibility and impossibility. From here, with the concept of the Self
now disenfranchised, the work will elaborate an involved analysis of ‘divine fatality’ as a
transformative happening through which subjectivity assumes a godlike disposition only
then to be consumed by the fury of that very state

– Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, extended abstract to The Chaosing: The Annihilation of Consciousness, Shadow-Becoming, and the Midnight of the Unreal, Columbia University, 2004

cf. Brad Brace’s island project

network critical
pique-assiettes

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Wellington loved us in April

National Scandal
on tour
snap
tagged

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in praise of Linus Torvald and another human being

Am I speaking with Mr. Taylor?

Yes.

Mr. Tony Taylor?

No, his son.

Can I please speak with Mr. Tony Taylor?

No. I’m afraid Mr. Tony Taylor is no longer with us.

Has he got like a divorce?

A what?

A di-v-horse?

No. He passed away.

So who is the main owner of the computers there?

No-one is the main owner of the computers here.

Like who is the main own-ner?

What is this call about please?

You have warning signals sent out…

What kind of operating system do I have…?

No. That’s what you tell me.

I don’t have to tell you anything.

You have warnings being sent out and this is not good for anyone on the…

Are you a scammer? You sound like a scammer…

No, I am not a scammer. I am a human being.

Well, this sounds like a crank call.

This is not a prank call. I am calling because warnings are being sent out from your computer…

What do they say?

Microsoft…

I don’t deal with Microsoft at all.

No? Well then, Apple, Linux…

No, not Apple either.

That’s what I said. Linux then.

Yes.

Right, Linux. [pause] OK. [pause] Good night and god bless you, my dear.

croydon
hommangerie
X

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