square white world

subject matter

In tragedy: the violence of the resolute. In comedy, switchbacks galore: He is She, and I am You, and They are the Eggman. In tragedy also, the humour of the resolute, like a higher form of comedy.

The violence of resolution can come as a castration, where it has no consequence. So it forms a correspondence, but it is to Oedipus that it corresponds should that violence choose for what selects itself, should it choose for what surfaces, this selection being the narrowing down that the decision opens up. What presents itself is the necessary which must be risked.

The type of the selfish actor has her ova in one hand and his testicles in the other. And, casting them at the sky, curses the plague. As happens in a rather wonderful children’s book called Master Snick-up’s Cloak, which begins: Once upon a time, it was the middle ages…

A selfish actor believes it happens to her alone. Note how Oedipus pops his eyes, that might correspond to his balls. So as to say, we are always dealing with correspondences.

With the suppression by comedy it’s not conflict that is suppressed. It is its resolution. Not the resolution of conflict, where all things shall be well, and you were just dreaming, but the violence of resolution is suppressed.

You might think this is difference. But difference is suppressed, in favour of the irresolvable: the involuntary identity that must resolve itself and must not resolve its differences with any other. Leading to the diverse and diversity.

No wonder theatre is depressed: it cannot agree to what corresponds to its castration. And it will be said whatever risk, necessity, danger or sacrifice it may have held is in the past. Here comes the future. Where we must accept that whatever our actions they are without consequence. But they are ours. So we don’t dare give them away for anything, let alone for nothing.

And it is for nothing that the stage stands. It is for nothing, when it is most effective, that a risking actor inoculates himself with the smallest gesture. By a detail just then surfacing, she takes the decision it is the minimum that will support her. And not burst.

…

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subject matter

We’ve said that movement gives us immunity from the mobility of the surface, that movement immunises the community from a situation that seems a certain slide. But how are we to move? How, when the political will is absent, do we change course from this direction that is every direction at once? How, in a state of powerlessness, can we decide anything? We might recall here that impotence of having no consequence, a fact of the surface, stage, and also a subjective power, or, power of the subject.

Then, everything moving at once, as the Angel of History says, progress, how do we know true movement from this? How find, found, make, an authentic politics from the fakery of a politics without power? One that, by its own admission, can see heat death coming. And does nothing. Of which we say, it can not.

We don’t know how to move but we can see it done. This has been part of our strategy: theatre can show us. The at-war-with-herself of the comic actor, what is she to do? The at-war-with-himself of the actor behind the tragedian’s mask, what is he to do, ask himself, What have I done?! As Pound does, in the final Canto, in its most moving lines, where he writes, Forgive what I have made.

Examine thyself, and change, we are told. Not worth living otherwise. Yet shouldn’t the one who tortures torture better? The one who fails, as Beckett says, fail? And the one who loves.

Change thyself, or choose the earth. This one. There is no other. Yet shouldn’t the revolutionary conduct the revolution? And what will happen the day after? And the day after that? We are on this stage a short time. Seems a shame to slip on out without a struggle.

Yes, we have seen it done: the risking actor chooses for the tic and follows it to revolution. This is how movement happens. It doesn’t happen, as you might think it might, by massing together the details that are our lives: it’s not a snowball effect of achieving critical mass, pulling together the ingredients, the intellectual with the labourer, the charmer with the tactician.

The movement itself is a detail. And this is the question of scale. Because, in a dynamic system, or chaos, the possibility exists for any factor, for even the most minor, the smallest, for the minima we have said, to produce throughout the system change. The movement is a detail. It’s not an accrete, the statistical aggregate of all the personal details which are our lives, which, we might say, is some of the reason we’re stuck on the plane of this mobility: we’re mobilised to ends, well, to the end, in this stasis. Civil war.

The detail is the movement of the principle, ‘first mover,’ that is, subject. Yet we imagine their aggregation, the accrete, of all of us, through a kind of social mediation, will produce the revolutionary subject. When the accrete is the swarm, Big Data, of all the details we provide, symbolic subjects, giving the metaphysical impression of a constantly mobile surface: that comedy! A swarm of … no longer of pixels … but forming a liquid crystal surface. Not the digital display screen: the playing-field of personal data. All true. Every single authenticity.

The risking actor is a false pretender who, with theatre with its depressed resources, finds it difficult to find employment … I forgot to say why theatre’s resources are depressed. There is a circle here formed by what a risking actor does, because it’s not comedy. She’s no comedian. He’s just not funny, but quirky, dangerous, possibly mad.

Like the Zen master, he holds up his finger. Like the Zen master, his finger is no longer there. He has lopped it off, had it lopped off, found enlightenment.

She raises her finger. Repeats. It is as if the finger takes up the whole space. There she is, just staring at her finger. Her finger no longer there. Finger no longer there. Supported by the void. A movement. In this detail, this tic, whatever it is, everything is mobilised. From the war does not come peace, or more war, but a single movement. Subject. Singularity.

…

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

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subject matter

It appears that two principles are necessary: comedy and tragedy. Mobility and transcendence. Two types of drives: one conservative, the other expensive, or expansive. Two states of matter, or material subject: one bearing value; one exercising value; one bouncing off the other’s steady offer. Yet we have seen this not to be the case since each is at war with itself, the comedian with her tragic nature and the tragedian who removes his mask at the end of that scene where he says, This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me.

We create from the war we wage with ourselves, don’t we? It is a creative tension, and one we carry from birth, since it produced us and we are its issue. And, possibly, we will reproduce it in others, or in works. Pieces of work, in which others find resolved tension from the forces set in motion or from which they take relief.

The comedian refuses analysis because she doesn’t want to look into her desperation, to find its source is only that, as we said earlier: it is the engine of the little peace of mind she gains upon a successful performance … of pain. Without it, she’s just not that funny. Then, like Hannah Gadsby, she finds a way to bring her pain into the performance and dares the audience to laugh. And notes their discomfort, and, with that recognition, they do.

All things head to entropy, heat loss. Entropy seems to have been a lot on people’s minds recently, since physicists seem to have found its opposite principle, in the time crystal. It is a system of, for, perpetual motion, and loses none of the energy it expends. The quantum parts of the time crystal simply bounce, in a state of movement which is also static, a stasis built on the quantum law of complementarity, of there being no love lost between us.

What time then does it occupy? since it would seem that a time crystal takes up no time. Or, rather, we have to do away with the spatial metaphors, and ask, Of what time is it the creation? The simple answer would be that it is the creation of a time of entropy, of heat loss.

Then is it no more complex than a reflection? than an image? since it allows us to see another universe, one to which we are opposed. A world of possibility: imagine this perpetual motion machine being the engine of a quantum computer. Its endless thought internal to its endless love of calculation. At no point does it say, I don’t have the energy to fight anymore. I’m tired.

Isn’t entropy exactly its infinite exhaustion? coupled with limitless creativity? On display: the most wonderful waste of time. No, stasis is not as we have thought, the lowest point of depression. A state approaching death. And it’s not as if one type of drive has won, over another. Neither is it the bearer of value winning out over the exerciser, in symbolic exchange, say; nor is it the complementarity of legal principles. It is, as Agamben writes, civil war.

…

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

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subject matter

The role of political management over the last two years of pandemic, or, to be histrionic, plague, has looked to be a direct use of biopolitics. Control of populations has been control of bodies, control of movement. And there looks to have been something sacrificed.

Biopolitical policing of populations, infected populations, has seemed to bring about a concession of the kind, since it is on a global scale, not seen since the mass mobilisations at the time of the globalisation of warfare, in the first and second world wars. Apparently it turns on matters of economy, this concession, where it is both disincentive to ‘growth’ and incentive to a type of specialised ‘wartime’ economy, to which the first makes its concession. Or sacrifice. But the sacrifice the political apparatus makes to biopolitics is of itself.

I think we can see this in a small change made in the vocabulary of New Zealand government representatives. As if by policy, for political reasons, the change has been from speaking of the vaccination metric in terms of the ‘protection’ of populations to speaking of it as immunisation. From a medical, scientific standpoint, this change seems unmotivated.

In consideration of climate change could or would we similarly replace environmental protection with environmental immunisation at stake might be human affairs in their entirety. The environment would need to be immunised against every human action. Can we imagine what this immunity might look like?

It has been said that it is capitalism, the capitalist plunder of resources, from which we must protect the environment. OK, why not immunise it? The thought is also there that we might do so by introjecting the problem—of capitalist plunder of resources—into the economic form of capitalism. The carbon market to trade in pollutant emissions seems exemplary in this respect. And the thought is there too, and to the contrary, that pandemics are natural forms of defenses: that is, the nonhuman environment’s immunity system.

We can, however, lay human affairs in their entirety at the door of politics. Or should that be at its feet? Then, I would have thought, since the forms of social organisation of politics are sacrifice, it is at its feet that they already lie. And herein the concession: biopolitics in fact looks like an abrogation of politics and a reduction in its political means such that it has no power. Or, it is immune to the charge making it responsible. Is immune to being asked to take responsibility: for what? human affairs in their entirety; every human action.

Politics no longer answerable, the forms of social organisation of politics sacrifice, the immunisation of populations as a political project: well, what meaning does this have other than the auto-immunity of political systems? That is, it’s no longer about the suppression of symptoms symptomatic to power but of political immunisation against those powers. They slide off, like the skins of images. So that the most obviously biopolitical plays into the freedom of politics from tragic necessity, from the tragic necessity of responsibility, plays as, slipping up on its own skin, comedy.

…

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

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subject matter

At some level, somewhere, everything is moving too fast. Where this is so, what grants us immunity from it? Movement.

Roberto Esposito has developed the political theme of immunity. He finds a relation by contrasting the immunitas and the communitas that unites the two. It is physically there in the words to see.

Esposito does not follow the route of pitting one against the other, of making communitas in the community an exclusionary principle. The exclusion of what is external to that principle does not make it an internal principle forming the community, the political community. The pushing out of foreign matter, foreign subjects, does not form the community in its ontological integrity.

Instead, Esposito has it that the immunitas is in the community. And it is this which makes it one. It is always a little bit of the outside raised to play on the surface of political certainty.

Immunity is then a matter of what Althusser calls interpellation, whereby the individual is interpellated within the ideological state apparatus. This is perhaps a funny way to put it, but isn’t it the case that ideology is made to work by including what is foreign to it? And isn’t this especially true at the level of the state? It would, in fact, be to construct it as apparatus, or what we have also called mechanism, that it does.

As soon as we say everything is moving too fast, we are struck by its inadequacy. More than its inadequacy to actual experience, what strikes us is either that the opposite is true, instead, or that it can be. And this makes for uncertainty: we are uneasy at comparing the surface of the world to the weather. Beautiful day. Ever get the feeling everything’s moving too fast? Well, it’s not!

We are in a stasis comparable to the last stages of a depression, a state of catatonia, where movement has become impossible. Ideology no longer covers over the truth while initiating us into it, as if it were a conspiracy. We are no longer covered by false beliefs of a false, imposed consciousness against the climate. The two directions, extreme as they are, coexist. The reason for this is that as a result of its suppression by the mobility of the surface, political movement has become impossible.

…

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

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subject matter

The combination of repression, suppression is followed by a further suppression. But this time it is a suppression of the political in the political. The political is now what does not play.

The reversal we talked about is this: where comic levity was suppressed, today it is tragic necessity which comprises a content or substance that is suppressed. Now, we might suppose content or substance to be bodies, to be the embodiment of what bodies collectively embody. The bleeding bits, not the edges. Animals, and so on.

We might suppose content or substance to be the bios. Or, at least, to refer to it. It would then refer to the ground and foundation of forms, since it would be that from which these are made. In-formed, as it were, or ex-formed. Licked like bear whelps into cubs. Or programmed by genes in the living cells to form tissue, flesh, the flesh of plants, the flesh of animals.

And in a way it is the case that the living-being of the planet is suppressed, but it’s more accurate to call it depressed. Its resources are depressed. The content or substance which is suppressed is so by … the surface. The surface here is the whole playing field. This politics occupies without itself being in play.

What plays on the surface is exactly the play of the surface: a kind of limitless mobility of a smooth surface which does not admit of bumps—or of cracks. That craze below the ice is at another level, a lower one, a compression layer, and an archeological one, a temporal one.

Time, now, time in all the massy heft of it, the unrolling gigantism of its inflated sense of urgency, the urgency of tragic necessity is packed deep down, lower than the void over which the surface slides: we might say it is in the invisible work. That work that now feels so weighty, so urgent, so intractable. That work, for example, of lowering carbon emissions, of assaying the cessation of unceasing destruction, of … bios.

Politics has no power to undertake the invisible work. That part of it that could is the rendering of all content and substance into air—of a particular kind: the burnt. Comedy today subsumes the bios and its tragedy. All that is light and air is the burning of content and substance, making light, the burning of the air.

…

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

If you would like to help it come to pass, and show your support for what I’m up to, please sponsor it: become a patron, here.

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subject matter

Suppression, repression: theatre suffered these for politics. It led to a reversal of roles, but we can only speak of a role reversal in view of theatre, and of the surface with limitlessness in its potentiality, because this is where it occurs. However, there also looks to be a restriction in powers: the potential limitlessness of reach is paired with impotence when it comes to consequence. Added to this, we have asserted of such powers that what lies in reach, which is movement, is both indivisible and of indeterminate duration: there’s no going back. What happens comes to us by report of the actions, events, subjects on the stage, who are not altogether human, and when they are mobilise forces which are not. So there is also a notional completion, a closure of the circle, where the circle is but another figure of performance, and, as Deleuze might say, a repetition of difference.

Was there political recognition of what had occurred, of what had been reported on? Was this of such a nature that political forces rallied to suppress theatre—as if it had the slightest importance? No, I would say the politicisation of theatre closed it off from itself: now that is the further reversal we are getting to, the role reversal whereby political recognition reciprocated, and, like theatre, closed itself off from being a politics.

Then, should we ask what is politics? A matter of social organisation. Like theatre, it need not have at its centre a principle, about which it revolves: anarchy is politics. Like theatre, it needs no morality to guide it (quite the contrary), to police its edges, directing policy, as we have said about being directed in that fashion: it too is amoral.

More than this, politics represents to itself its mechanism, it demonstrates to itself, in a way that we could also say that it reports on it, what it is doing, or, as some are fond of saying, what is to be done. How think of the social organism? It doesn’t matter but that this thought has to be tied to actions, events and subjects. Politics concerns the movements of subjects, that is, their conflict; but, again, these are only political subjects to the extent there is political recognition, to the extent that they share the stage. So its subjects, and its subject matter, are those of self-representation and recognition, political subjects.

…

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

If you would like to help it come to pass, and show your support for what I’m up to, please sponsor it: become a patron, here.

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Everything would amalgamate in front of her eyes, and then clear again. Strange harsh outlines swam out of the darkness. Sasha saw a city, sharp roof peaks, intertwined ropes and wires; one-dimensional creatures, brown like coffee grounds, jumped over them like fleas on unwashed hair. Resembling check marks drawn with a thick brown marker on a list of groceries, they twitched their legs, wriggled, and then made sudden jerky movements. Sasha would never be able to explain why she found these creatures so repulsive, but every time she shuddered at their appearance.

“Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-three…”

At “sixty,” the brown check mark insects would notice that they were being watched. They saw or felt Sasha’s presence and crawled closer, up to her very eyes, and moving her head was impossible.

Perfectly defined graphical landscapes unfolded in the background: mountains, arches, building, and towers, a gorgeous and sinister city. The oily pavement glistened, like a carbon-black ear of corn. From one fragment to another the distant landscape changed, filled with details, became three-dimensional; the amount of brown check marks grew with it. They threw themselves at Sasha, like a cluster of starving bedbugs. Lacking arms, unable to breathe, she chased them away the only way she had at her disposal–by concentrating. By staring.

— Marina & Sergey Dyachenko, Vita Nostra, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey, 2018, pp. 215-216

…

“Nikolay Valerievich…”

“Yes?”

“Am I no longer human?”

“And why is it so important to you?”

Sasha looked up. Sterkh sat across the table from her, calm, benign. His ash-blond hair framed his pale triangular face in two parallel lines.

“I’m serious, Sasha: what is so important about being human? Is it because you simply haven’t experienced anything else?”

“I’m used to it.” Sasha looked down.

— Ibid., pp. 260-261