I’ve come to the end of my slope

Swallowed up in space
I cling to the debris of reason
drowned in its murmur
naked on the shore

Alien artifacts
relics of future rupture
sorry histories of perceptions
of cyclical catastrophe
ransacking the museum for possible weapons
castaway
on an inclined plane

© Vidy-L, Jean-Luc Marchina

Notebook of nine syllables

for Standard Schaefer

or Alt title (also for Stan Douglas)
If-Stan-Is-Stan
The new unhyphenated
‎Alt country‎















"...the body being a communism
of nerves and gimmicks"

Even Sisyphus is movin' on up
Autodidaction on demand
Certificate program to kill

We count cards
Quoting proust
Staffing museum
Alsos and still-have-yous

May the best church win
Said the rabbi's phone
Converting to wine
Now that the skin has been revealed

No, nothing, said Proust
‎Agriculture is overrated
planning unequal to
abandon
markets forcefed
and hoisted by yards (by petards)
by x or y axis

By blogpost she said
‎vision with danger
I stopped looking
Telepathic waxwings
Luscious fleshlike weeds
I tend toward blonde
lions of yestercheer
Ordure all announced
Now don't go all‎ jed clampitt on me
Ouch said the little guy camper
Take care that she does
This pixel
Motion sickens the non-
human in him
Big bear and his bracelets
this pixel was made
for you and me

‎(written last sunday flying home from NC - with Standard's notebook in hand.)

The Horse Omnibus

   - seems to be about militarism and praxis?  there should be the smell of orange in the air.

Lost in the circular
order of the coif
I marched into autonomy
all the way down
without name, no history
no reason, no law
all arms, no letters
Guilty of the practical
of the three legged stool
‎Feeling without smell
largely by bleeding

If I am vampiric
or lucid‎ In gotham
I propose land to the left
‎next to the left-right-left
Did I mishear
I meant anti-anthropomorphic
Juke or cut
Surgeons of the general order
Lock of my hair
blocking vision
Sick cosmic joke
to insert the bit
about bitter pills
about the valorisation of valor
Fatalism por favor
Here's a cube of flesh
for the dogs

96 Tears

Staking coverage, I'll take the sites without the cites please.

I'll take question mark and the mysterians. Bottomless ductwork. Upside down cake.

I'll take a potato chip and eat it.

I'll take manhattan, gotham city.

I'll stake.

Ideas Have Consequences - Adam Curtis

Quotations from Adam Curtis's interview with Hans Ulricht Obrist in e-flux.

"How ideas have led us to this position in ways that those who had the ideas didn't really intend."

"[Proust is] part of the problem, which is that obsession with your own experience... What ... happens with Proust is you get the rise of the one voice, the inner voice, which dominates literature today."

"Inner feelings are everything."

"We're living in a conservative age, and it produces cowardly art..."

"...part of the individualism of our age is not just a reflection of the rise of consumer capitalism. I also think it was part of a very conscious political project after the second world war that deliberately tried to push people away from becoming collective." 

"...my working theory is that we live in a managerial age, which doesn’t want to look to the future. It just wants to manage the present. A lot of art has become a way of looking back at the last sixty years of the modernist project, which we feel has failed. It’s almost like a lost world, and we are cataloging it, quoting it, reconfiguring it, filing it away into sliding drawers as though we were bureaucrats with no idea what any of it means. They’ve got nothing to say about it except that they know it didn’t work. It’s not moving onwards—we’re just like academic archaeologists. It’s terribly, terribly conservative and static, but maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe in a reactionary, conservative age, that’s what art finds itself doing. The problem is that it pretends to be experimental and forward-looking."

"I think the way forward is somehow to make it emotional, to rediscover the idea of transcending yourself and joining together with other people....  I think the mood of the moment has to do with a sense that if you’re going to the woods on your own, it’s scary, and you feel weak. But if you go with your friends, it’s fun. A lot of politics hasn’t understood this."

"...I believe that ideas have consequences. And why I like people like Weber is because they are challenging what I see as that crude left-wing vulgar Marxism that says that everything happens because of economic forces within society.... I’ve never believed that. Of course, economic forces have a great effect on us. But actually, people’s ideas have enormous consequences...." 


"I have this theory that you can take very complicated ideas, which are at the root of our present world, simplify them, make them entertaining and funny, yet still keep the essence of what they’re saying. That’s the fundamental thing I believe in. And I loathe the opposite view that you can’t do this without being complicated and obscure and talking as though to only a small, elite group. So I would read someone like Max Weber and think to myself, well, actually, that’s similar to a funny story I found last week about targets and hospitals. I can put the two together."

"I want everyone to have champagne. I want everyone to enjoy the clever things that people do. What I loathe are those who try and keep them secret, and use them as a way of proving that they’re clever."

How I wrote one of my books

Separating Nietzsche’s Tongue From His Cheek

“A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots” (37.8M results)

The problem is perhaps how to embrace the incommensurable, i.e., without keeping accounts.

In Debt – The First 5000 Years, David Graeber describes a baseline communism as a component underlying much human activity (if only we would be more aware of this and openly celebrate it!), at home, with friends, even within the most profit-driven corporations. That is, when I’m at my day job, with my co-workers, I don’t keep accounts of how much B owes me & vice versa – e.g., I loaned him a pencil last week, and I helped him out in a pinch... but B is not going to become my debt peon for this.  There is an element of “from each according to her abilities to each according to her needs” that goes on.  Other metaphors used for this involve carrying ones own weight – not for oneself but for the “team” or (ugh) “for the good of the order.”

In this light, the assertion that “communism knows no debt” shouldn’t astonish us. It’s just outside of the rules of exchange -- refusing to keep accounts, which in an ethnographic context makes sense, that is, as a descriptor of behavior but not necessarily an ideal.

Graeber has an intriguing discussion of Nietzsche’s historical argument in Genealogy of Morals (in Debt starting at ~page 78), in brief that N accepts and runs with Adam Smith’s presumptions about human nature, about humans as calculating machines.  Per Graeber, Nietzsche & Smith anticipate “Levi-Strauss’s famous argument that language is the ‘exchange of words.’”

Graeber “think[s] Nietzsche helps us... to understand the concept of redemption. Niezsche’s account of “primeval times” might be absurd, but his description of Christianity – of how a sense of debt is transformed into an abiding sense of guilt, and guilt to self-loathing, and self-loathing to self-torture – all of this does ring very true.”

Graeber has a very telling footnote where he suggests that Deleuze was naive to accept N’s historical argument, which was really just an “imaginative exercise.”

I think G is being way too nice to Nietzsche here, even if this reading of N does help G’s argument.  And even if G is right, the smokescreen and cynicism of such an exercise – and the fact that it has duped generations of readers – can’t be easily forgiven (or maybe I should say "forgotten," to avoid the redemptive).  In any case, this is one of my favorite passages in Graeber's book. I find myself revisiting it.

“…for Nietzsche, starting from Adam Smith’s assumptions about human nature means we must necessarily end up with something very much along the lines of primordial-debt theory. On the one hand, it is because of our feeling of debt to the ancestors that we obey the ancestral laws: this is why we feel that the community has the right to react “like an angry creditor” and punish us for our transgressions if we break them.…"

"There is also every reason to believe that Nietzsche knew the premise was insane; in fact, that this was the entire point. What Nietzsche is doing here is starting out from the standard, common-sense assumptions about the nature of human beings prevalent in his day (and to a large extent, still prevalent)-that we are rational calculating machines, that commercial self-interest comes before society, that “society” itself is just a way of putting a kind of temporary lid on the resulting conflict. That is, he is starting out from ordinary bourgeois assumptions and driving them to a place where they can only shock a bourgeois audience.

It’s a worthy game and no one has ever played it better; but it’s a game played entirely within the boundaries of bourgeois thought. It has nothing to say to anything that lies beyond that. The best response to anyone who wants to take seriously Nietzsche’s fantasies about savage hunters chopping pieces off each other’s bodies for failure to remit are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer – an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:

“Up in our country we are human! “ said the hunter. “And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.”

The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found through the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began “comparing power with power, measuring, calculating” and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt.”