square white world

I believe in my listeners – Gu Cheng

As the amphitheatre
As the fog
You have to
Theatres are boxes
Like a box
Revisiting a work
As it stands
The production’s title
As Miles Davis
Needles and Opium’s
Needles and Opium

– from a review submitted by Mark Amery on Sat, 22/02/2014 – 2:52pm.

we have no lights

the visible has retreated
beyond the utterable
the sayable
which now fill, both,
the utterable and
the sayable,
the horizon formerly occupied
by the visible
which had to retreat
pursued by the tactile

and although we are ourselves pursued by images
the visible has retreated
because the images pursuing us are literal
they refer even when it is only to themselves
they signify even when it is only themselves
they signify
they touch even when it is only themselves
they touch

Although it sounds odd,
there is no room for the visible
despite what Mark Amery says
and this explains why
as Werner Herzog says
we have no adequate images
we have no lights

it sounds odd to say the tactile,
is it because our bodies have swollen
to fill the entire room
and our faces touch the sides
of the screen?

…

it has been suggested that everything is art
when as we all know
everything is data

and data can be turned into money
only just

I really want to know if you snore
because when I know enough people who snore
I can sell this information to a company
who have a cure for snoring
which they want to sell to you,
to you or the person or people who sleep
next to you.

if everything is data is it a sheer quantitative occasion that gives rise to speculation and the opportunity to make money?

is a certain datum more bankable than certain others? Network theory would have us believe so: because of the spikes of those who are like Casanova in the world of love-making, those exceptional ‘influencers’ and ‘opinion-makers’ whom others follow, those who stick out statistically from the overwhelming ennui of averageness.

it is also certain that this is no longer a question of mediocrity as it is certain that no data is noise: for the former, I have my day-to-day, my workaday routine, which does not alter … except in a sudden and almost inexplicable eruption of eccentric behaviour – this is the network of my behaviour, with its outrider, the action or event which is – precisely the point – rare; and as for the latter, all this background behaviour, the subway route I take to work, the places where I like to stop so that I stop there with sufficient regularity for this datum of sufficiency to figure me, to etch me out of darkness, none of this is noise. And we have machines to watch, listen and collate this data, so that the gathering is not nearly as wearisome as it once was. We are looking out for the outlier, the outrider, as much as mapping the pattern of the ordinary; the ordinariness of my activities in their specificity – but not their individuality – provides a character, a silhouette, a backlighting, a saleable ID: it personalises me. My sudden departure from this background is not exceptional and no break from mediocrity, because none of this is mediocre for being personally mine, it is proof of the rule, the test that shows the network of behaviour as exactly a network, with a sudden, expectable outflying node.

…

“Nothing positive is done, nothing at all, in the domains of either
criticism or history, when we are content to brandish ready-made
concepts like skeletons intended to intimidate any creation,
without seeing that the ancient philosophers from whom we
borrow them were already doing what we would like to prevent
modern philosophers from doing: they were inventing concepts,
and they were not happy just to clean and scrape bones like the
critic and historian of our time. Even the history of philosophy is
completely without interest if it does not undertake to awaken a
dormant concept and to play it again on a new stage, even if this
comes at the price of turning it against itself.”

– Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy? in Joe Hughes’s book Philosophy After Deleuze. Joe Hughes then says:

“we should dwell for a
moment on the risk Deleuze mentions: in replaying concepts, we turn
them against themselves, we distort their meanings, and we put them
to work doing things they were never intended to do.”

…

on another channel:

“Jon Stewart demonstrates that Kierkegaard’s criticism was not directed specifically to Hegel, but actually to some contemporary Danish Hegelians.”

is this intentionally humorous?

a review of Frederik de Wilde’s work that I like a lot and which I like a lot. Let’s read it together.

oh, now I discover it’s actually an interview with Frederik de Wilde. Even better.

I’m up to this bit:
“Most valuable is bringing together a group of passionate inter- and transdisciplinary individuals. As an artist you are a free electron. I don’t have to align myself so easily with rules and regulations, institutes, … i can be ‘wild’ and that’s a quality that is generally accepted and respected. This stimulates and facilitates cross linking, confrontations with different ways of seeing, other ways of experimentation, getting out of the comfort zone.

“In the case of the Nano Black research it depends.” …

This bit has relevance to the discussion of the symptom: “After a half a year of lobbying, and signing documents, i finally achieved to get a hold of the data. The main restriction was not to represent the actual data but only ‘subjective’ data, whether it’s a sculpture, painting didn’t matter.”

This is good too: “To be able to generate truly random numbers one would need a routine that can break the causality law, an observation of a source that acts without any or any knowable cause.”

And: “It’s hacking, or tuning into, the substrate of the universe.”

Strange to read a text with emoticons: “You have to be in an ecology to understand it, get a feel of it. Blowing things up is a part of that too ;).”

I’m a sorrowful child,

never grown up.

From the grassy north shore

I followed

a bright white road into

a city full of gears,

narrow alleys,

wooden shacks, each lowly heart.

In a bland haze of smoke I

keep telling green stories.

I believe in my listeners –

the sky, and sea spray.

They will cover my everything,

cover my undiscoverable

grave. I know then

the grasses and wildflowers

will gather, as the light dims,

kissing over my sorrow.

– Gu Cheng, 1980.10

waging theatre on class symptoms where class symptoms now invoke the redistribution of wealth from the middle to the top which has become capitalism’s only recourse in finding an inner limit now that the outer limit of resource exploitation has been surpassed.

taking theatre out of the class war equation where it plays the mediating role because at the same time that class symptoms now invoke the redistribution of wealth from the middle to the top, the ever-thinner, ever-spikier top, this redistribution itself has become the theatre of the haves against the have-nots and the drama of the increasing gulf between rich and poor: theatre is in the middle. Theatre has replaced the middle class. Yet it remains a theatre of operations, this divide between, this widening crack or barranca separating, the super-rich from the service class of servants; it remains a war in so far as there is a war effort and a propaganda machine which dramatizes the battles and brings them to our screens; the spectacular machine and the actual evisceration of the middle go together. The middle becomes the empty space for the performance – and celebratory spectacularization – of the death of the middle class and the value crisis it suffers as it dies: the middle becomes an empty space of negotiation without a voice because it is merely the rich and the poor who matter – who matter as the dramatic poles of a conflict which is only about them in so far as it increases the numbers of poor and decreases the numbers of rich.

info@minustheatre.com

That’s an incredibly pessimistic view of the financial sector

Eventually he wants to replace a whole lot of his workers with robots

Khan’s Westside Halal Meats

Theatre everywhere except theatre – where in theatre it is a minus

It really does look like rain out there

70,32,37,14,37,14,33,

What is missing – room work
…
Imagine an object
Work with the object
Exchange the object
Bring the object or as close to
Work with
Exchange

What we’re doing is slowly chipping away at a vast stone to get to the kernel but we’re not there yet.

Symptom and Theatre: Minus Theatre Research Group

info@minustheatre.com

Minus Theatre – Derepresentation

my research tests theatre as a memorial site, signalling to the future through symptoms.

critical operations power symptoms: experiments with theatre

operating symptoms, maximal worlds: experiments with theatre

critical experiments with theatre

…

His face was broad and his eyes spaced widely; his lips were full, his teeth very crooked, and his nose rather large. These features conspired to form an expression that was both honest and nonchalant – and nonchalance is a form of elegance, when it demands much, and declines to reveal its source.

– Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries, Little, Brown and Co., London, 2013, p. 108

The banker spoke with the controlled alarm of a bureaucrat who is requested to explain some mundane feature of the bureaucracy of which he is a functioning part: controlled, because an official is always comforted by proof of his own expertise, and alarmed, because the necessity for explanation seemed, in some obscure way, to undermine the system which had afforded him that expertise in the first place.

– Ibid., p. 109

– Franz Kafka with Ottla, his favourite sister

A man on the inside has to contend with the pawns – with all the pieces of the system. But a man on the outside can deal with the Devil direct.

– Ibid., p. 127

– Ray Brassier

In his mind a protective glaze had been applied to the crystal forms of high abstraction: he loved to regard them, and to wonder at their shine, but he had never thought to take them down from their carved and oaken mantel, so to speak, and feel them, supple in his hands.

– Ibid., p. 129

The pale light of the day, falling slantwise across Nilssen’s desk, froze the eddies of pipe-smoke that hung about his head – fixing each coiling thread upon the air, as mineral quartz preserves a twisting vein of gold, and proffers it.

– Ibid., pp. 131-132

the well-wrought mythology becomes a vividly remembered reality. That’s how ‘history’ happens.

blockade: theatre against symptoms of neoliberalism

blockade theatre: against the symptoms of neoliberalism

MINUS: Theatre agains the symptoms of neoliberalism

upholding

the right to be forgotten, the right to silence and the right to invisibility

minus theatre

…playing with this as a conceptual platform

Minus: theatre against the symptoms of neoliberalism

it could be a hard sell but it makes sense: minus theatre

MINUS THEATRE

less + minor = minus

theatre adds something to representation

just as well as theatre subtracts something from representation-

– Kafka Minor Literature –

– One Manifesto Less –

adapting ‘minor literature’ to theatre – // – escaping the theatrum philosophicum which is a trap

escaping also the ‘blockade’ mentality of resistance to neoliberalism by removal – absolute deterritorialisation – escaping the equation … by acting inside the equation outside of dialectic

just as non-existence is not the opposite of existence and non-being is not the opposite of being but its polar opposite along a planetary continuum

adding :::

stupidity

failure

risk

negative intensity

double negative

disavowal

negative disavowal

trans-positive

trans-negative

…