— why is it people like bad music?

— it’s not that they like bad music, it’s that they prefer it.

… almost all of those who are born unlucky have been brutally prevented from developing more than a fraction of their own abilities, and this is perhaps the most shocking fact about our human world.

Undoubtedly less shocking, but possibly more weird, is the incredible fact that in the contemporary world many even of those who are born lucky are voluntarily forgoing the opportunity to develop their inner resources. Gorgeous and delicious fruits, grown by seductive geniuses, sit on the plates of these lucky people but remain uneaten. A process of decay has infected the lucky in various parts of the world, and very notably in the United States, leading many even of the luckiest to turn vehemently against complex thought in general and the cultivation of the intellect in particular–and even to turn against complex pleasures. And in certain circles, crude thought and ignorance are openly respected and praised, while the concept of basing one’s conclusions on evidence (or on replicable experiments)–and even the principle of rationality itself–are ignored or even mocked. Traveling in precisely the opposite of the direction that would help the world to dig itself out of its crisis, many lucky people have come to believe that our spiritual and mental lives should have only two elements: first, everyone should learn whatever technical skills are necessary in order for them to be able to work and make money (skills learned by the unlucky would bring them a small amount of money, skills learned by the lucky would bring them a large amount of money) and second, for relaxation, people should consume very simple pleasures such as very simple stories, very simple music, very simple eroticism, and various sadistic forms of amusement such as television programs that show people insulting or tormenting each other or killing each other. Omitted from this short list of recommended intellectual activities–and from the type of education that can be derived from it–is anything conducive to the development of the wide-awake, thoughtful, curious, sharply logical, and deeply emotional human beings who could save the world, on the one hand, or, if a better world were to be created, could actually enjoy it.

— Wallace Shawn, Night Thoughts, 2017, pp. 69-71.

subjective powers

We see more clearly what is at stake in a beginning actor. Everything for some. That’s why it can be a good exercise to raise the stakes. And we might leap immediately to the conclusion that this means the stakes for you, or me, personally; the guts we sometimes say it takes guts to show: when we know the visceral does not come from the viscera.

Out on the stage, on the surface, even when they are real, like in the case of Hermann Nitsch, there’s something pitiful about this loose jumble of organs. And something shameful in the sacrifice. Nudity, sexual acts, faked are pathetic, performed have a flattening effect, unless the point of these is this alone: to be what they are, and, being what they are, the effect of the surface. That is, the stakes are rather flattened than raised. Pornography tends to being a pure surface on which nothing moves, and it is often, if not always, the artifice or its exaggeration that we find moving: shame or titillation, it can go either way.

With artifice and exaggeration, we are back home in the theatre. The ‘being what they are’ which looked to be an action, wanted to be an event, ends up being a subject who makes no more claims on us than any other. On a raised board, underlined, so we can see it as it is, or as it ought to be.

In other words, at the extremes there are no breaks. Open your legs, open your fly, your mac, and what are you asking for, really? Sympathy? Same with the spill of our innermost organs, those structuring identity. Those upon which it is said we can make a politics.

The stakes it can be a good exercise to raise are indeed the ones we place in what is personal. And here they can have the value of our identities, of our selves. Of the jumble of things which go to make us up: they have the inflated value our investment has given to them, that inflated is real; and it is not for the sake of a disenchantment, for their deflation to ‘being what they are,’ or for the spectacle of humiliation or a moral lesson, however twisted, like the one parodied, when I am nothing. When he was, as Mervyn Thompson wrote about 1984, an empty husk. But it is to raise the stakes when these are sacrificed.

We raise the stakes in order to show we are mistaken if we think there is on the stage no sacrifice. Because it is the stage itself which comes along and renders what is most personal into subjective effects, impersonal. It renders them as having no consequence: for this is one of the subjective powers we are talking about. That is, the personal is the starting point, not the destination of the exercise. You don’t get your guts back after the show. These are thereafter stage properties.

The type between a beginning actor and a selfish actor might be named the actor who takes risks. A risking actor is one who can raise the stakes, by taking what is personal and turning it to impersonal effect. Thereby losing his possession of it; spontaneously letting go of her investment: because it happens suddenly, in a single movement.

We can start from a story that has personal intensity for you, for example, your life. Play it. Take your time.

Use all the resources you have around you, most of all time. Use the language of theatre, which involves placing yourself imaginatively in the situations that had maximum intensity for you, and, if it involves speech, involves speaking from there, to the people you imagine around you. In the words you would use, and they understand.

… but look: when you place the noose around your neck like that using that imaginary rope it is like you are giving yourself airs… You are on the Western Frontier, not at home at all, and playing at once the hangman who places the noose around your neck and the man who shot Liberty Valance. … and when you tease up your hair like that, as if you would pull it out by the roots, it’s like you’re at the hairdresser, very upset with what you’ve got or with the results.

I don’t need to make these suggestions to you verbally, anyone can see it! …another actor might like to shoot through the rope on which you were so recently hanging. And together ride away, Calamity Jane.

Or, hold the mirror to you. So you can see in fact your pain, your soul sickness, is not being poked fun at. It is being moved somewhere else entirely from where you’d stuck it. Where it had stayed so long mired in your person that you came to suspect it was not only yours but you.

Movement on the surface distinguishes itself from action by giving itself what may be the slimmest excuse to move to something else. To invent something new. Some new outcome. The movement is not then caused by the action. Neither is it causative, in having agency. The movement is from its point of fixity, away from it. An abruption. A subjective event.

…

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

If you would like to receive these posts, as they are written, as letters addressed to you, please send me your email address.

the subject

That a beginning actor brings to the stage something of which she feels she is about to be dispossessed is why the notion of sacrifice, that runs through Blau’s reports, manifestos and theoretical writing on theatre, still holds true. Where a selfish actor remains intact, identifying the depths of her personal formation, the formative years, coaching, training, and so on, with the void beneath the stage, identifying it as being what supports her, instead of the real nothing, a beginning actor is able to experience the sensation of these being cut from him. As if all that training was for nothing.

It was all for nothing and means nothing: this is the truth of the matter. This is your first day on the job. And what they didn’t teach you at school is what you need to know around here. Otherwise, you won’t survive.

What’s the good of this castration–this obedience to beginning that means going through each time, risking each time, out of necessity, one’s identity? …but haven’t we said it goes further than risk? That there is sacrifice?

What else is about to happen? What else is the audience here for? If there was no sacrifice to the audience would be returned their capacity for judgement. If there were none, as the selfish actor seems to deny there being, or the necessity for there being sacrifice, to her would be returned the self-congratulation. For him would be the applause: and she stands without the smile that is anyway ungracious and holds out her palms, open, in acknowledgement that this is all I am. Like you. Human.

If the guts left on stage at the end of the performance aren’t mine, then why do I feel this emptiness? I want to be among people again. Among my own. In company, engaged in pointless chat, which to the outside looks like the most pointed bitchery.

At the bar, after the show, well it’s like a very personal slanging match. Like the Colony Room. What a relief to be called a cunt! One knows that the vicious, the really vicious attacks will be those couched in the most childish terms.

One understands that if one is really truly upset or truly upsets another there will be silence, then, Pooh. If the most awful thing has happened, the Arts Council has withdrawn its funding, for the last time, a pause, then: That’s a pooh.

Deflation at the most significant events; inflation of the most trivial. And we should note among the trivialities are counted the most personal of issues, her dose of clap, his impotence. Or the age of a new girlfriend: For Christ’s sake, she’s three! … Yes, I know. But she has the body of a four year-old.

Why is it that personal identity, those things we had hitherto considered our most precious memories and shameful secrets, our depths, when the show’s over are subjects for hilarity? Because it is restorative. Not to be laughed at for them, but to be thought to have them still. For it to be acknowledged one is still in possession of those organs of which one had been relieved by the knife of the stage.

We repeat, but what’s the good of it? Isn’t it exactly for there to have been a hearing, to have been given a hearing by an audience? For the accolades, well of course: but these are due the corpses too left for the stagehands to pick up and drag off after the show. And note the theatrical meaning of corpse is to be overtaken onstage by unsuppressable hysteria. The deflationary language for this, one of the worst things that can happen, is getting the giggles.

Isn’t it exactly for the good of the audience, that good which comes from its exercise of judgement? that good Badiou talks about as going on and as necessary in the interval, pointing to a contemporary trend in France to do away with the interval. Making the interval, for him, into a necessity. A necessity for there to be theatre, as if without the interval’s permission to pass judgement there would be little point to it.

Then there’s the good in itself: it is good to have public sacrifice. In however sublimated a form. But in a form so sublimated as the modern stage, is it really sacrifice? For the selfish actor it is not. To think not, and to agree, we are like selfish actors.

…

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

If you would like to receive these posts, as they are written, as letters addressed to you, please send me your email address.

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works of subversion, of critical subversion, of the dominant digital culture, works critically subverting, for the minority interested in such things, the domination of digital culture, as clever as they are, sometimes ingenious, remain as clever and ingenious as the objects of their critique, they remain as a paean to human ingenuity, forgetful of the other species who lack that ingenuity, but, still, who underwrite the ongoing survival of this clever ape

…

We have no confidence in this attempt at the man in full.

— email from Christopher Hitchens’s widow and agent to all who would act in complicity with his biographer, Stephen Phillips or the publisher of the proposed bio, W.W. Norton

…

Who is … ? or Hooton hears a hayek

Matthew Hooton, a PR consultant¹, writing the Politics column for the NZ Herald of 5 February 2021 (PR–with the bloody beating heart of politics in its hands), warns that the Climate Change Commission’s advice to government, if followed, would make 1984’s reforms seem like kid’s stuff. He says the report, prepared under the chair of Rod Carr–the Rogernome in question–“combines the chilling indifference of the most swivel-eyed 1980s Rogernome with the absolute certainty in analytic ability of the hardest-line Soviet apparatchik.”

Rod Carr himself shown in the photo beside the column looks more like Tolstoy in his muzhik phase than any apparatchik–that or a Roger-Gnome. But the language is striking in its evocation of another era altogether.

“Give Carr,” Hooton writes, “a ready-made ideology, whether written by Friedrich Hayek or Arne Naess, and he undoubtedly has the intellectual capacity to drive it to its logical end.” While the intelligence is not doubted, the wisdom is. “[Simon] Upton,” Hooton continues, “now Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, has always displayed similar fervour, making the same transition from free-market radical to deep-green mandarin.” This is a striking observation, about mandarins … but it has nothing to do with Arne Naess’s whose deep ecology cannot be called an ideology, and whose injunctions on public debate I am here breaking–avoid tendentious quoting, he says. Avoid tendentious use of straw men.

It has everything to do with Hayek, as a lot does since the war, except the war. It has not least to do with the era in which he propounded his thesis.

Apart from sounding the alert about the dangers of communism (“Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion”)–like Henny Penny (the sky actually was falling)–Hayek wrote: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men [sic] how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” (The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, 1988) He also said that if socialists studied economics they would not be socialists. Or deep-green mandarins.

Hooton writes the “commission says bluntly that some businesses will need to be closed, but says the benefits of climate action must be shared across society, and for the costs not to fall unfairly on certain groups of people.” I’m not sure what he means, and suspect a meddlesome sub. But then he goes on, and this is the Hayekian bit:

“To achieve this [sharing both costs and benefits of climate action equally?], [the commission] says we must consider the connectivity between “the material and non-material”, between “the people, the land, the atmosphere and the oceans” and indeed “the connectedness of all things, including the past, present and future”. It claims to have in fact taken all this into account when setting budgets for each gas and advice for each industry.²

“No human mind can do this, as understood by everyone but fanatics.”

I think that bears repetition: No human mind can do this, as understood by everyone but fanatics.

But what about a deep-green mandarin who has the intellectual capacity to drive a ready-made ideology to its logical end?

Hooton recommends that Carr move back to his “old belief in using prices to gather information and markets to make decisions.” This is despite the Letter from the Chair, the Carr-seat, stating on page 3 of the report, “As a country we should use only our fair share of the remaining global carbon budget,” and despite budgets referred to throughout the report being not financial but carbon. So that a market does seem to be at issue, one where carbon–and its emission in the form of gases–is monetised in order that price information can be used by that market to make decisions.

Hooton signs off with, “The Soviet economics he seems to have adopted…” this is Rod Carr he’s talking about “…more recently…” seems to have adopted more recently, or, more recently “…has a record unparalleled in history…” ? “…not just of causing unnecessary disruption and incalculable costs…” incalculable! “…but of delivering everything but what the policy-maker intended. There’s only 37 working days to tell him so.”

Only 37 working days to work up a parallel history to show that the record of these Soviet economics Carr–he’s only chair of the Commission mind you–has more recently adopted, or, these that more recently have a record of producing everything but what the policy-maker intended–the report contains only advice not policy mind you–and of causing disruption that is unnecessary, probably because it involves action on climate, the costs of which are incalculable, despite the best efforts of the report to calculate them.

But only fanatics could! Only the fanatical would attempt to! No human mind could do so.

However, and this is the clincher for Hayek’s thinking, what no human mind can do, except the fanatical, the market can, using the mechanism of price to gain information. And this is in fact exactly what the Climate Change Report proposes. With the rider that the auction reserve and cost containment reserve price triggers in the NZ ETS need to be higher and that the price corridor they signal should be sufficiently wide, precisely, to allow price discovery by the market to occur and to factor in inflation to prevent the price levels from eroding in real terms.³

The belief underlying the Climate Change Commission’s Report on climate change is in its quantifiability in keeping with current economic thinking. The problem is seen as one belonging to the carbon economy. This is the economy that trades in carbon stock, storage and the reductions of its release into the atmosphere quite apart from any deleterious effects it may have there. When the sky is actually falling.

The report and the advice it contains refuses the political courage that in a time of plague protected NZ from its worst effects in favour of an economics in mitigation of those effects.

This leaves open the question of what is driving Hooton’s attack on Carr, which offers the grotesque spectacle of an Hayekian using Hayek to attack an Hayekian. How many Hayeks could an Hayekian Hayek if an Hayekian could Hayek Hayek? As understood by everyone except fanatics, no human mind can do what a market can.

Meanwhile, in a parallel history in the multifactualmediawurst, advertising himself on Twttter and weighing in at a healthy midbeard length, seemingly unaware of Hooton’s PR pro bono work for Carr, in the same newspaper the day after, Simon Wilson plays down the red scare Hooton hacks up.

…”the most shocking thing about the CCC report is that it isn’t very shocking. … The proposals seem, somehow, obvious.” (Saturday 6 February 2021, Weekend Herald)

Wilson concedes they will be lifechanging. But he is fearless, looking down the barrel of a “mere 1 per cent per year hit on GDP”. It’s like it’s a barrel of fun–“a mountain of new economic opportunities”–and Carr is a barrel of monkeys.

But, scarily, “lurking between the lines on those 188 pages”, and likely what has stirred the Hooton from its hole, “the hope that we’ll do it using good democratic processes.” Like cheese. I suppose.

Carr ends the interview thumping on his tub so hard Wilson can’t decipher the words, having, perhaps, got beardlash from Carr. “And then it was over.” Wilson writes. “He walked off into the bright sunshine, a little skip in his step. Let the debate commence.

“Read the report. Submit on the report.”

Or just submit.

…

1. “The eloquent, sometimes angry, dependably provocative commentator from the free-market right of politics. The bête noire of very many on the other side [sic]. The founder and owner of Exceltium, a political PR firm, a role which his detractors contend should disqualify him from …” – for who Hooton is see here
2. The oddity of a budget for “each gas” has sort of been addressed earlier in the article, having to do with “emissions reductions” in the Commission’s report, itself a grammatical oddity, since it is not a question of the reduction of emissions such as the addition of an apostrophe would express, as in emissions’ reductions.
3. The relevant passage is taken with minor alterations from page 131 of the report. NZ ETS–New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme–is a carbon market towards decarbonisation (a favourite word of the report), that is, turning a negative to positive account, for the sake of measurement, by price, that is monetisation. But this magical trick is not without the consequence that the new positive will then obediently go back to being a negative.

…

, it is the beginning of a passionate and all-consuming love affair that will defy all social bounds …

, email us with your favourite historical lovers.

— from Auckland Art Gallery’s newsletter promoting Ammonite.

…

and now to end with the very quite music of Lotte Laserstein’s Abend Über Potsdam (Evening Over Potsdam), 1928:

what kind of report to make, not a record of the days, and this music playing, with its dark intimations, which make you yearn for WAP feat. Megan Thee Stallion and its easy innuendos of something beyond both sex and death. For so it must be.

It must be further out than the body’s passions and further in than the deep well.

Perhaps it belongs to the totalitarianism of data Refik Anadol visualises:

— thanks K!

just as perhaps it is in the ludicology of fluxus, so imagine us saying, who that woman was is not important, but art is alive. I mean let’s keep names out of this.

As I was saying…

Wrong Link

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there are no boundaries in art … or it is the very boundary that is its sustaining cheesewire g-string

…

a light, fluent surface.

— from here is M. John Harrison talking about a story in his own collection, Settling the World, that taught him how to …

…

and on this surface, say the philosophical surface or its equivalent in one of Leonard Cohen’s songs, there are mining operations.

These are as energy intensive, writes Bloomberg, or have been, as in 2018 to require 140 TWh of electricity, “rivaling the entire annual electricity consumption of Argentina.”

In 2017, the cost of mining a single bitcoin varied between $11,000 and $26,000–says Investopedia.

What’s more is that the majority of mining takes place in China, and, Business Insider writes, “tightening government security is pushing miners to relocate to places like Kazakhstan and Venezuela.”

These places are Politically Unstable–as my source for these figures presents it:

Hive’s Vision, by contrast, is to build a better digital currency mining infrastructure–go deep in the well–using green power for the blockchain.

Hive is building their “rigs in stable jurisdictions to prolific industrial scales–making them some the world’s largest and most energy-efficient datacenters.” [sic.]

the ascent of Hive

…

Lockdown

on the edges of a storm. Out the window deep grey tones broken by a white edge of ermine. Fading light but it has been circling all day. The heat and humidity amplified by curtains on each side thick and dark walls of dark water. Solid walls black like black mould creeping up a wall. Like being in an old fridge, hotter for having been an appliance to keep things cold and insulated, its heat exchange broken anyway. Not plugged in beside the road.

We are insulated in the sick insulation of what was once a natural product but is now synthetic, a thready material that is barbed. Not so bad as Pink Batts which is made of glass fibre and gets in our lungs, blows free from the cracks in rooftiles, or under eaves, cracks in never well put together New Zealand homes, gets in our eyes. I remember reading about such glass fibre insulation being recorded as present in the Yosemites. This now spills out globally from the world’s broken fridge. A zoonotic thread made of stripes and bars of genomic fibre.

It’s hot in here, even here, on these evening islands. Windblown by virus fibres.

Perhaps it is pollen.

Like sickly orchids in a hothouse we are being pollinated.

…

Ah, on another tangent or asymptote it is so refreshing to read Ulrik Ekman’s questions that are network critical but that feed in to the other writing I am engaged in in parallel, the reason for my absence here over stretches–but then I’m never sure there are readers for this here.

…

Mark Blyth is another voice important to listen to–thanks D.–for his curmudgeonly critical pugnacity on economic matters. He explains what it is the market values, and, as byblow, why it might be whole countries and cities can be shut down–from an economic point of view. Why has the world, the muchbruited and feted globalised world of the global marketplace, not simply sat down and given up and … frozen to death or burnt to a crisp … given the shuttings-down governments have now figured out they can do?

It is that the market values assets and capital liquidity and secondary financial products. The general economic market values nonexistent stuff.

This is why existence can get on very well without it.

Let it.

That’s all we ask.

…

Finally, the pornography of the human condition we didn’t know we needed:

The Sad Girl Manifesto

…

Not finally. How can there ever be any finality ever again?

the palms of the Bush dynasty reaching out to the Trump.

I didn’t tell anyone, how could I? But there were times at the beginning of this enigmatic time, which has only slowly begun turning its face towards us, when I thought I cannot bear to be part of a world where governments do not claim the political prerogative of representing the society that elects them; where governments are powerless: where in fact the political is powerless, and can only claim any power to act by proxy, or, as I wrote in the last post (the last post!), only by having forgotten what the instruments, the tools of political prerogative in one’s hands feel like can governments take hold of them again …which brings me to the topic of arts and culture.

(I in fact wrote last time that government forgets what it can do, it forgets that the labels on the buttons which stop the economy, the levers that switch it onto tracks all rusty from disuse, read use by political prerogative in EMERGENCY ONLY: of course this goes against all those commentators who want the state of emergency to have become the status quo of politics-as-usual; it goes towards the notion that the state of emergency becomes a political event when it is declared by governments so to be, that is, when it is not a declaration of economic policy and business-as-usual. Here the economies of developed (inculcated-with-neoliberal thought) nations seize a power earlier given away: it is this that inspired the earlier feeling of it being unbearable that this should be the case, and that the political seizure should be mainly unconscious.)

What are the arts and culture these days but institutions given an economic right to life? what are they except competitive examples of that which the principle of price in the market set up for arts and culture has placed among the political elect? that is, such institutions as survive in the marketplace politically set up for arts and culture are politically selected, much as we might talk about natural selection under social darwinism. Of course, the marketplace has to be set up first, and–first rule of neoliberalism–its setting up by political institutions has to be hidden, then forgotten.

In NZ, they are funding organisations for arts and culture and festival organisations, some of them charitable trusts, the ones with a right to life: the only institutions on the cultural artistic horizon which operate at the level of institutional, that is political, power. Of course, the prerogative here also hides from itself and is forgotten.

On 18 April 2020 I received an email from the New Zealand Festival, which among other things informed it was a charitable trust. The New Zealand Festival also wrote:

If you would like to play a role in supporting the
 Festival’s sustainability, New Zealand artists and arts 
workers in this extraordinarily challenging time, we 
welcome your involvement. For context, $10-$15,000 would 
enable us to commission a New Zealand company or 
artists to develop the concept stage of a new work for the
2022 Festival part-time over a period of 2-3 months. This 
would in turn provide much needed income, security and 
hope for the company’s artists. New Zealand artists, 
the very heart of our Festival, are the focus of our 
fundraising strategy right now...

The letter was signed, in a humanising, face-giving gesture, Meg Williams and Marnie Karmelita, to whom I then wrote asking if the New Zealand Festival might consider as a counterweight to this request for … charity and charitable donation, a similar letter addressing itself to artists, whose interests, in “income, security and hope,” it claimed to represent to its donors?

Would it not be appropriate to submit to artists on whose behalf it might be approaching these (its) philanthropists? I wrote. Or was the New Zealand Festival approaching its five-figure donors on its own behalf?

I was asking if charity might be due artists before it was due the charitable trust out soliciting … but not on the street … like those charity-beggars or chuggers?

In retrospect I wrongly used the word advocacy, asking if the New Zealand Festival might take on this role for real … and not something like disingenuously. (This was wrong of me because I have a habit long ago acquired of asking whether funding agencies should not be advocates to governments–to the Power–for artists, that is arts and culture. See here. My friend, U. kindly pointed this out. But in the case there is no Power!? (see above.))

I will not say I was surprised when somebody calling themselves Team Experience and Executive Coordinator, named Suzy Cain, for New Zealand Festival replied.

Kia ora Simon

Thanks for the feedback; I have sent it along to our Executive Team for you.

Please take care and all the best.

Mā te pono
Suzy Cain
Team Experience and Executive Coordinator
Tāwhiri Festivals and Experiences

As I understand it, not to be too pedantic, feedback, unless cybernetic, is a highpitched whine. No, you’re right: to be too pedantic.

OK, so we’ll take this as cybernetic.

I love the idea of supporting the New Zealand Festival … I can think of submitting a project: perhaps a season of Howard Barker plays?

First I’d have to form a company, again, from artists. The company’s support–and this on first reading was not clear to me: I thought the word company’s in the New Zealand Festival’s chugging email might be a kind of Freudian slip, the company referring rather to the trust itself than any artistic or cultural company–from your generous donation or tax right-off sponsorship would give hope, income and security to those artists … who would in fact be extremely easy to find. And involve. And company-ise or bring into an institution, like a theatre company, which could itself be formed on the (legal) basis of a charitable trust.

It might be consolidated on the basis of a charitable trust yet still support (the income, hope, security of) corporate-styled offices such as Suzy Cain describes as belonging to an Executive Team, who, might in turn be humanised and face-given by signing in their proper names, Meg Williams and Marnie Karmelita.

Although this is not at all what I wanted to say. I wanted to talk about society built on dissensus as being the model–clearly the meta-model of society–for arts and cultural involvement in the Power. Which must be at the institutional level–of arts and culture institutions–not funding organisations and festivals.

I knew that the promise of this crisis, that it didn’t make any; least of all did it promise through the slippages entailed in the political management of the crisis any reevaluation of the principles by which that political management is in government informed.

What is meant here by political management is shutting down economies; what is meant by principles are those on which the business-as-usual of economies is based. Then by reevaluation is meant the power of a political will, of government, to change those principles on which the business-as-usual of economies is based.

At best what we have had over the period of economic shutdown–which can be taken quite literally in the lockdown of the public realm to the private and domestic realm–is a vague period. It has been one of not knowing how it will come out, of not knowing if any political strategy is going to work, and of not knowing, or of having inadequate knowledge, of what is really going on.

On one side we have felt the state flexing its muscles, sometimes behind the vanity screen of voluntary adherence to social rules, and out in the open, the enforcement of an almost arbitrary authoritarianism, then through the complicity of private agents jamming police lines dobbing other citizens in for breaches, Stasi-like. On the other side we have experienced what has felt almost like an over-reaction. Although to say so is to fistpump with the types of people whose opinions Trump mainlines, so we won’t be saying that.

The enigma continues in the prospect of many workplaces becoming filled once more, but by people doing very little; the businesses themselves propped up by subsidy and returning to work workers who will have little work to do. This has been, will have been, another of those embarrassing moments when that light negligee of economic dogma has shifted–showing, unsurprisingly, but nonetheless still shockingly, no body, nobody!, underneath.

Others have been a universal living wage having been coughed out to millions without any government whining about if you don’t work for it, just die, you just die! (As it happened this was what a Russian friend said to a Chinese friend, then both laughed and said: And we both had revolutions!) And if we take into account that the pretext for this coughing up is not say so bad as some global pandemics (but we won’t say that), then has it been too easily sidelined, the economic orthodoxy of neoliberalism? Has it given up without a fight? (The enemy COVID-19 is… evil evil evil, but hardly lifethreatening to the world economy! or globalism!)

But some of the explanation can be found in the price-mechanism of Hayek-inspired (who said so? Mirowski said so!) neoliberal thinking. That is, the machine is supposed to run independently of government actions, government being relegated to irrelevance, otherwise known as governance.

Then what happens? State governments shut down the mechanisms of the market, almost as if they no longer know what they are; almost as if they have forgotten that these levers and stop buttons used to have big signs on them saying use by political prerogative IN EMERGENCY ONLY!

The market is the market’s to shut down!

What to say about the promise–some commentators have evoked the work of Mark Fisher, who talks of the present as haunted by the possible futures which have never come to pass, and now never can. Why haunted? because of the hope, because of the promise … even if it’s simply one of a technological utopia. (I recall undergoing training at primary school in how to deal with all the leisure time I was going to have to endure as an adult, when technological progress was going to have, was supposed to have, coincided with enlightened social policy.) Now the future’s here and it’s hardly what we expected. … But then the future gets here again, with COVID-19, and it’s really not what we expected!

And again it returns, the future, bearing the φάρμακον, the pharmakon, that Greek gift–think Troy as well as Austerity–Derrida so well interprets.

And with the promises of returns to work looming, for me and some young people I know, as if this were the promise, I picked up Kundera’s book Encounter. It reminded me about the role of kitsch in hiding human cruelty.

And in view of the certitudes of work, as opposed to the enigmas we have suffered through, and suffered from, I read: “The existential enigma has disappeared behind political certitude, and certitudes don’t give a damn about enigmas. This is why, despite the wealth of their lived experiences, people emerge from a historic ordeal still just as stupid as they were when they went into it.”

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Seth Abramson writes in the Guardian:

“In 2018, there are actually more reliable news reports than ever before, as there are now more responsible media outlets online and in print than there ever have been – a fact that often gets lost in debates over “fake news”. The digital age has also internationalized hard news reportage, meaning that readers have access to high-quality reports from around the world with an ease that was impossible before the advent of the internet.

“But this sudden expansion in focused, reliable news coverage has coincided with some of the largest and most prestigious media outlets cutting resources for investigative reporting. The upshot of all this is that reporters have less time or ability than ever before to review the growing archive of prior reporting before they publish what they’ve uncovered.”

He goes on to advocate (advertise) curatorial journalism. It’s like journalism but smarter. It’s all about context–that other dream of the net: hyperlinks as hypereferences and the interweb interweaving texts and documents and statements, online discourse in short, in multidimensional networks so that any one thread, quote, citation, reference might be followed back to its earliest online expression; or connected horizontally, and so on. But this is not the system we have.

We are therefore once again living in that exceptional present which would have been the future if it hadn’t already arrived, that exception that is always made for this year having more reliable news reports than ever before as well as more unreliable news sources than ever before as well as more words expended on, well, just about anything–taking into consideration the rise of text over speech in daily communication–than ever before.

The answer might have been, had Seth Abramson been so inclined, journalism with a scalpel. And we might well have been saying about our exceptional present moment, as well we might, that the time for journalistic balance has passed. The idea of a report being neutral, and of it presenting both sides of an issue, or curating the multiple facets of a complex ‘story’, belongs to the past. We might so have been saying. But what is of our devising, as the present is supposed to be, in the Anthropocene, is smarter than us–is supposed to be: so we are in the predicament of making sense, sense for an audience in the case of journalism, of a situation, a situatedness, of a realtime-base for issues, we have carelessly, hopelessly and unconscionably complexificated.

Journalism with a scalpel would offer a different diagnosis: maybe cut first ask questions later–maybe, but with the surgeon-reporter being held accountable. And perhaps more than events and issues becoming more complex, more deeply intricated and extensively imbricated, than ever before, issues and events have become more integrated, more deeply intimated and extensively implicated–in the social, for sure, but, as surely, in the personal.

Having an opinion is a public liability. Have a stupid opinion! Say “to be honest” a lot, honestly. Or imho, modestly. Have a stupid, make a stupid tweet, and the world is cheeping with you.

Imagine the informed writing to the level of the educated. Imagine no more–because in fact more informed journalists are writing to a better educated public than ever before this year. Of course this year stupidity has been normalised as populism too.

I find myself–more honestly, I lose myself–walking in a library modestly wondering what it is for, since it doesn’t itself seem to know. And the ones who work here give the others who don’t, who used to be members and who now are customers, or patrons, the resentful eye, while adverting to the latest electronic offering, whether it is wifi, or the latest pulp fiction or pulp nonfiction (pulp fact? fat nonfict?) available via the app. Like Seth Abramson, in the Guardian, I have been an advocate (advertiser? advertisement?) for curation: librarianship, isn’t it a matter of leading the social animal to the cultural water? Making better animals to make a better social? (Dot says, But you can’t make it think.)

These GOSPIS (Grand Old Signs one Participates In Society), like the Grand Old Deity itself, in whom, and in which, more people put their faith and believe, with honesty and modesty, than ever before–even to being pridefully jealous of the competition (this year more nationalistic than ever before)–have lost their tongues. Journalism must–you can’t fight it!–progress by borrowing ways of talking about itself and its essential tasks from, where? the operating theatre? or the art gallery?

Then the idea of information has lost its teeth. Open mouth, ah. Closed mouth, mm. We know there is more information than ever before, this year, and that’s why it’s called Big D. Journalists are among the data miners. But there isn’t the time and there isn’t the return, and this is the latter. Who wants to live forever? No, that’s not the question: Who wants to pay for information?

And libraries, going forward–resistance is futile!–, borrow ways of talking about themselves and their essential tasks from? They don’t borrow. They’re told how to speak for themselves by those who, usually those which, since they tend to be annexed to institutions, of which they once were the jewels in the crown, fund them. They are told how to speak for themselves so as not to try the patience of the daleks. Who or which will cease to fund them if they were suddenly to speak for themselves, since they would be asking for it, for extermination.

Yes, good journalism once it too was something to show off, now it’s tackling the big issues, scoring the big anchors, more than ever before this year. Just like a university was the institutional encrustation of a library. It was the paste and setting for the cultural riches collected over time, protected over the bad times, saved to adorn the good, through careful, assiduous, committed and (need it be said?) professional librarianship. But middle management detests decoration, for which there will be more martyrs than ever before, this year, mouthing silently the words written on the wallpaper, God Save Us & Oscar Wilde… and for the journalists we will add, George Orwell…

The political (read: economic) bankruptcy (read: extra-economic) of the Left has made a necessity of virtuousness (read: morality). What used to be the Moral Right (and under Reagan the Moral Majority) has been displaced by the Moral Left: this is everything from LBGT to the Green rights of environmentalists and… exactly where its hem begins to fray is the bruited-about Crisis of Value, in other words Crisis of Middle-Class Values. The rights of the family are of course complicated by families of nonhetero albeit heterogeneous makeup. The rights to property are complicated by rights of access, for example, of copyright to knowledge: all coming under the swelling sphere of the commons.

The point here is: the Left used to be about policy, now it is about a moral stance; while the Right has policy like an iron bar that it cannot pass.

What is hateful in this and disastrous for an oppositional, not to say critical politic, is the caving of the notion of value itself, which is now tethered to the somewhat redundant operation of capital, where so many other options of funding are now so much more readily available and applicable, new venture capitalism and entrepeneurship having become a game for the very wealthy and the very stupid. The question as to whether these are mutually irreducible categories is overtaken by the political bankruptcy and unwillingness of the Left to enter discussions at an intellectual advantage–in case it is accused of Rightwing privilege.