The capacity to engage is limited. I have hit those limits hard. In this phase of life, I cannot maintain any semblance of the old networking nomad. Looking back, through the archive, through the days, weeks, months of restless movement, engaged encounters with hundreds of people, what is there left? Engaging with colleagues during the day seems to be enough. It saturates each day, not leaving energy to engage with anyone, anything afterwards, except for the mundane dimensions of the anti-creative life of Imperial consumption.
Monday, 17 September, 1962
Clear, cool
Got up at 0500 PDT and on getting to the bus station across the street found that the bus was to leave at 0600 PST, so I went back to the Y and laid down until 0640 PDT. The ride to Seattle was most pleasant. I went to the Frye Hotel (Ashley N. Doak, mgr.), made myself known to him, and he provided space as soon as I ret’d. from the RR station where I made arrangements to leave tomorrow on the “Empire Builder” at 4 PM PDT.
Spent the rest of the day at the Fair, taking pictures and seeing things.
conflict
Tapas notes about the Wisconsin pro/anti-union conflict and the Egyptian shift,
Simply unbelievable. I never even suspected that Tahrir Square could echo in the USA.
I reply, sotto voce:
I don’t think it is echoing, except as a media construct, but, really, it’s at least a bit offensive to characterize a whole country as full of fat sleeping slobs, although there are those who are precisely that here (and elsewhere in the corpulent world vs the thin world). There are conscious people here now and in the past. There have been multi-million-person marches in the streets, police rounding up tens of thousands of protesters in JFK Memorial Stadium in Washington, tear gas, shootings, bombings, and so on. While, yes, many in the present population are anesthetized by over-consumption and economic ruin, there remain those who will march and confront the despots in power. It may not be so long before you witness a scale of internecine violence in the US that makes satrap rulers and their suppression of impoverished populations look like a walk in the park. I’d explore the history of this Empire if I were you (or simply reference Tacitus’ “Annals of Imperial Rome” for a start.) This present Empire is fraught with any and all of the possible irruptions known to any comparably-scaled nation-state unit. It was only three generations ago that three percent of the population died in a major internecine war.
Empire does not mimic the provinces, it corrodes from the center out…
at the edges of the envelope of power projection
When approaching the edge of a protocol-driven projection of power, the first thing noted is that the edge is in flux, constantly. Depending on the metric flow of the power, and the metric flow(s) of the countervailing chaos, the edge will shift at any temporal and spatial scale. The juxtaposition of controlled and un-controlled situations represents a more-or-less steep gradient from directed to random (or directed to countervailing directed) flows. A good example to consider is the two polarized and hegemonic forces of the Cold War compared to highly ordered (Imperial) military systems being projected into poorly organized social systems.
The edges of hegemonic Cold War projections of power were often located in social spaces of great chaos. But these points-of-contact generally did not impinge on the monumental and rigid structures (enabling ideological rigidity) at the core of Empire. Empire shielded itself with layers of decreasingly ordered spaces. The borders as projected closest to the two primary centers of power were defined by rigidly controlled edges across which there were few incursions or expressions of chaos. Natural borders represent a special case of intervening ‘natural’ chaotic systems which provide a temporary or long-term barrier to impingement. However, a power nexus has to deal with that chaotic border itself to maintain reasonable order there for its own population.
The space containing a vacuum of power is quickly filled whenever there is a localized energy source of a great enough magnitude to fill that space. It is more slowly filled when there is no localized concentrations of power. Again, the maintenance of an ‘edge’ is really about the maintenance of a gradient of order with a certain steepness.
An Imperial power will be more strongly be drawn into vacuums merely by the steep gradient between its highly organized (military) system and that vacuum.
The protocols of nation-statehood (currently) define geographic boundaries of power projections. However, it is clear that these boundaries and the protocols themselves are constantly in flux and themselves are finally defined by balances of power-projection on both sides. (Consider a con-federation versus a republic.) The border on chaos is a border that is under the greatest threat of alteration (because of that steep gradient mentioned previously).
western terminus Yampa Bench
Sleep difficult, not sure why, whether simple discomfort, though the back of the truck seems very comfortable in the immediate impression, warm, soft enough, but body cannot find a comfortable position, side to side, somehow, problems. Could be that yoga hasn’t been happening in the last days. Hiking is a challenge for the body as well.
Drive up to the head of Sand Canyon, intent on doing a hike, but what looks like bad weather coming in, a heavy front across the whole west, sends me back after a short recon along the Bench Road. It seems doable as an alternative escape route, if this end is the worst, though, in wet conditions, forget it. And it totals thirty miles to Elk Springs, not just the three miles I did on recon. Almost all of it is in the red and yellow (bentonite) clay-sandstone alluvium, and this is precisely this same stuff which sits at the top of the Echo Park Road — from the 2000-foot displacement on the Mitten Park Fault, so, no real solution in heavy and widespread rain. However, this doesn’t seem the case — the rain is sporadic, fast-moving, and interspersed with bright sunshine and the roads are basically still dry after two days of ‘winter storm,’ so fretting about it is a waste of energy. Either I get out on Friday or I don’t and have to wait a few days. Plenty of water, fuel, and food, so that is no problem. The only locked-in point is the flight next Wednesday evening to Portland. But I’d still hate to miss the yurt-raising in Glade Park at Collin and Marisa’s this weekend! more “western terminus Yampa Bench”
on participation, part one
I was telling someone the other day that I am a good participant. I know how to jump into a situation and contribute in a way that is sensitive to the ambient flows that are happening at the same time as clearly manifesting a unique set of contributing flows. Perhaps a bit too conservative in respecting the paths of those ambient flows, but it’s probably better to be slightly more conservative than liberal. Uhh, such loaded terms. Useless words after they are so distorted by socio-politics of certain cultural configurations. Although it is ironic to note that here in Australia their political meaning is in (antipodal) opposition. Which simply emphasizes the idiocy of politics (as Peter Tosh observed once: Politics, “poli” means people, “ticks” are parasites, politics, parasites on the people). Words, language, always tends to go through this reification process. Followed by a morphing process when the reified language becomes overwhelmed when attempting to explicate new situations or when circumscribing known situations with a different point-of-view. The reified structures will be bolstered and protected until usage simply makes them redundant.
more “on participation, part one”
Ice Land
Wow, the lid is blowing off the formerly staid and sheep-like Icelandic society. Following the collapse of their entire economy from top to bottom, side to side, Icelanders are finally making a vocal and physically critical look at the excesses of the political and business leaders who they have supported without question over the last couple decades.
News from Iceland usually centers around glaciers, volcanoes, whaling, tourism, or in more recent years, music. But all that has been displaced by the spectacular fall from fifth highest on the world’s standard of living index to International Monetary Fund-ed pauper-hood, all in a couple months.
And of those same government officials, politicians, and business people, not one has paid any public price for their despotic (nepotistic!) greed (aside from some of their Empires collapsing, surely, though, after they have secreted away the cream). The Chairman of the Central Bank and former Prime Minister David Oddsson — nicknamed in the 1990s Little Hitler by the few who saw his rule as one based on enormous reserves of ego rather than economic expertise — has refused to resign or even admit any errors in judgment while the entire national economy has collapsed.
Not prone to display dirty national laundry in the international arena, Iceland has been ridiculed with an unprecedented vehemence in British and other international press outlets, often at the hands of expat Icelanders who are so fed up with the whole scandal that they are breaking the public self-critical taboo. Several leading international economists, familiar with the Icelandic situation are reminding the public of the warnings that were proffered months ago of the possibility of impending crisis, all which were ignored by a government who, in the run-up to the crisis, repeatedly claimed the economy was sound.
In private conversations, I frequently pointed out the deep nepotism in the architecture of power that suffused Icelandic society as well as the reciprocal sheep-like obedience of the general populace; especially among the government politicos but really everywhere in a system that sustains perhaps only three of the possible six degrees of separation. Everybody knows everybody.
At any rate, I had wanted to post some links to pertinent resources in this fast-developing situation if only that it might be an object lesson on the excesses of a system that Iceland was very talented in upholding — that of consumer capitalism in all its vain-glory.
There’s the Iceland Weather Report by native, Alda Sigmundsdóttir. She has taken some major strides over the history of her blog, most recently doing interviews with voices critical of the current regime including one with the Icelandic economist Thorvaldur Gylfason.
Another voice which I concur with strongly based on my long experience with Icelandic culture is voiced by New Zealand economist Robert Wade. Small dribbles of news in the more traditional style of Icelandic media (passive echoing of officials) may be found in English at the Morgunbladid (the main national newspaper). They have been absolute supporters of the Oddsson regime and the reactionary Independence Party that he represents.
I could relate many stories from Iceland, and, indeed, have done that here over the last 14 years, but these days, my attitude is that they deserve what has happened. The broader population accepted uncritically the fiscal direction of the Independence Party and the incredibly greedy business elite (very very large fish in a very very small pond). Some Icelandic voices have recently pointed out this very sheep-like behavior on behalf of the public — as something that hopefully is in the process of being purged through increasingly violent protest actions that are both long overdue and at the same time completely not disturbing the equilibrium of the ruling elite.
nettime reflections
sotto voce: another short point (belch) I would risk making — I think there is a real danger in this stage of Empire to focus on personalities rather than structural relations of power. That is, the “Office of the Presidency” has changed greatly during the Bush regime, mostly not as a result of Bush himself but because a convergence of forces (okay, Cheney, Rove, embody the forces perhaps.. etc etc) — a convergence of forces that are structurally evolving at this moment in the Empire. Of course, those concentrations of power may simply wane during the Obama regime, or, more likely in my mind, is that they will increase, given the intense desires and energies and attentions projected at (the) Presidency. Given Obama’s awareness of media, this will be a ‘natural.’ But this evolution, whatever happens, will not be THAT closely tied to Obama, IMHO, but simply the trajectory of Empire… I am hopeful for a kinder and more intelligent Empire, but what else is a kinder Empire than one which is on the way down, unable to brutally control the sources of it’s power; add intelligence to kindness, and is that akin to beautifully playing the fiddle while Rome burns? Or simply more intricate and obscured warfare on less suspecting victims? Watch for some interesting machinations of power in the next 4 years… I have decided, personally, that I will have lived during the (first) peak and subsequent decline of the (first) American Empire. All’s to do is to document that life and find some humor among humans.
doh…!
turning centuries
Hurricane Gustav appears to be altering the political process of the late empire. Natural systems biting back. Ultra-left Fundamentalist Christians will claim that it is the LORD striking the Republicans and their national convention down in the heat of globe-toasting climate change.
The gang heads to Roxbury, NY for the Turn of the Century Days (the dot.com bust? nope, the previous century…). Old time baseball, music, food, in a mellow atmosphere.
Later, Monopoly and a campfire under the stars.
meeting jos
dig the soft romantic glimmer focus, Josephine, did you do that on purpose? just the effect for a New York state of mind at the Empire Diner again, twice in the same week. FINALLY meeting the sparking online collaborator, maker of funksoup, sonnet subterfuge, viroid flophouse, and when you dare — and to top it off, she is charming, sharp, and doing even more cool things.
Beckett
en route from Grand Central to Bedford Hills. lunch with Anthony at the Empire Diner, we walk down there from meeting at Penn Station in the morning. an eatery where I used to go on occasion when working in Chelsea. long time passed. groups of tourists stop on the corner and take photos of the diner. it’s a land mark. marking the land which can’t actually be seen — it’s all paved over and dug up. so, the city as one big land mark, and nothing else. no land left to mark. we mark time with dialogue. conversations which are continuous registrations, trajectories from the past. launching into an immediate and present future. stopping at way-points to register the locus, then rocketing onward. upward. bouncing through some Beckett. ah, Beckett — when the privilege of having a conversation about Beckett? rare. to explore the textures of a literate vision of such elemental power, circumscribing the moment, being, and the perfect intertwining of both to create life. hmmmm, been in the country too long. though the sight of stars is nothing to feel inferior about. they leave different traces in the self than the traces of known and historied voicefull lives.
while the infrastructure labors along. trains slow and imprecise. although arriving in the same places from day to day, the time of arriving changes the place to another, given the slowness. barely able to stay on the track.
through Harlem with hardly a look into the structures of the past years, the rennaisance, onward, northward. up the Hudson, on the Hudson River Line. I’m inna New York state of mind-full-ness. greasy face from lunch of fried veggie lintelburger.
back to thinking about Kevin. what to say on Wednesday, the memorial. thinking how that maxim of avoiding any pre-tension. that is to be remarked. as well, the power of being to invoke collective presence.
response to Lev
sotto voce: Some comments (on the nettime post from Lev Manovich, Mon, 28 Nov 2005 21:22:03 -0800 – his text snips in yellow)…
We Have Never Been Modular…
but we have agreed-upon standards via political hegemony, pressure of dominant ideas, and participating in the easy consumption of ‘whatever works’. And since standards underlie the concept of modularity, I’m afraid that I disagree unless you are talking about another collective “we” that is represented by the demographic you are addressing and are member of.
Thanks to everybody who commented on my text “Remix and Remixability” (November 16, 2005). It was provoked by reading about web 2.0 and all the excitement and hype (as always) around it, so indeed I am “following the mainstream view” in certain ways. But I would like to make it clear that ultimately we are talking about something which does not just apply to RSS, social bookmarking, or Web Services. We are talking about the logic of modularity which extends beyond the Web and digital culture…
And it is worth mentioning that none of those ideas are remotely sourced in digital technologies — they are constructed on the entire precursor socio-technical infrastructure of engineering in general. digital technologies are a ‘final’ product of a long and continuous development process of standardization that started when Empire (or collective social life) was born.
Modularity has been the key principle of modern mass production. Mass production is possible because of the standarisation of parts and how they fit with each other – i.e. modularity. Although there are historical precedents for…
From an engineering point of view, modularity is a subsequent process result following the necessary precursor: the development of standards.
As a simple anecdote, I recall traveling across Europe in the early 80’s. When crossing a border, say, between Italy and Germany, or France and Germany, aside from the ritual rubber-stamping of the passport (and occasional body searches, but that’s another story), one was aware that suddenly, when before the streets were full of Renaults, Citroens, and Peugeots, they were now filled with VWs, Mercedes, and BMWs. To such a degree that if you saw a Citroen Deux Cheveaux puttering around in Bavaria — a car I occasionally had in those days — you would invariably honk and wave (at the ‘hippies’). The currency changed, the language changed (obviously), the places for money exchange shifted, the electric plugs morphed, the telephone rings, cables, and plugs changed. Distance didn’t unless one crossed the Channel where temperature, length, weight, currency divisions, and volume changed to absurdly baffling non-decimal fractions. The socio-political history of the EU (and globalization as well) is mapped over the development of international standards that (have) effectively wiped out those prior social differences.
The history underlying any and all movements towards a pervasive technology (regardless of the geographic extent) is the history of standards development. This precedes any (modular) engineering deployments. (A wonderful USD350 million glitch on a NASA Mars project — when an engineer (collaborating with ESA) forgot to convert between metric and US measurements). Of course, economic (military) hegemony is absolutely connected to this process of standards development. You join in a military alliance and if you are the minor partner, you have to re-bore your cannons to take his caliber of projectile, lest, in the heat of battle, you run out of usable ammunition.
I think a discussion of standardization supersedes the discussion of modularity as most (all!?) characteristics that arise in a description of modularity and its impacts are derived from the ‘textures’ of the socio-technical landscape that are determined by standardization. In a way, collective knowledge as a very broad and general social product is a result of standardization, especially if you are considering, for example, knowledge that spans disparate physical locations. Even with the existence of the basic technology of the Internet, no collective knowledge may be derived without a standardization that transcends the physical restraints on the digital system — a primary one being calibration of time scales, but there are many other calibrations that must take place as well. In the Paul Edwards article quoted below, he points out that there are heavy consequences for detecting global warming because the propagation of measurement standard differences between national and international organizations. An example of the fragility of knowledge building and the importance of standards in collective action.
Strip Latin from biological nomenclature, and international collaboration in the entire discipline is immediately snuffed.
It would seem that the larger the social span of an institution, the greater the built-in desire to establish and propagate standards among its constituents. Maybe remix is the ultimate surrender of the individual to the collective. Standardized idiosyncrasy. Lovely end result.
And at the other extreme, some of the more powerful expressions of artistic creativity take place in a landscape where there is some freedom to deliberately ignore standards (and modularity) and filter lived experience through the idiosyncratic filter of self — re-presenting that lived experience rather than an obsession with filtering someone else’s signal…
I think your mention of musicians sampling published music points to something perhaps more tiresome — related to the instance when rock stars sing about life as a rock star. A simulation of a simulation. TeeVee shows about teevee producers. Escher’s lizard consuming itself. Maybe remix culture will turn out to be so efficient that it will come to that — annihilation by self-consumption of its own mediated worldview…
Maintaining consistency in this huge, constantly changing network is the work of standards. Standards are socially constructed tools: They embody the outcomes of negotiations that are simultaneously technical, social, and political in character. Like algorithms, they serve to specify exactly how something will be done. Ideally, standardized processes and devices always work in the same way, no matter where, what, or who applies them. Consequently, some elements of standards can be embedded in machines or systems. When they work, standards lubricate the construction of technological systems and make possible widely shared knowledge. — Paul N. Edwards
Edwards, P.N., 2004. A Vast Machine: Standards as Social Technology. Science, 304(7 May 2004), pp.827-828.
Measurement is a comparison process in which the value of a quantity is expressed as the product of a value and a unit; that is, Quantity = {a numerical value} x {unit} where the unit is an agreed-upon value of a quantity of the same type. The concept of a quantity such as length is independent of the associated unit; the length is the same whether it is measured in feet or meters. A standard is a physical realization of the definition, with an agreed-upon value to be used as a reference. — Jeff Flowers
Flowers, J., 2004. The Route to Atomic and Quantum Standards. Science, 306(19 November 2004), pp.1324-1330.
become republican
JC sends this to da40 — become republican
I respond,
sotto voce:
only too true, though personally I’m not so rabidly anti-Jesus. it’s the zealots who, as the cartoon points out, hide behind His words and are fundamentally hate-full and intolerant. not what I would expect from the pursuit of a Christ-like behavior emulation…
seems there are glimmers of hope that the society has woken up from a bad dream that was imposed by the 2000 pseudo-election. I frankly don’t have much hope though, that the systemic corruption in the political system is going to go away at all, demos or repubs are the same animal from that perspective.
in the Republic system of Rome, there were various contingencies (balances of power) to cover during different times of need (war being the primary one, though it was misused as a power-manipulation tool — nothing new about that! It is interesting that the concept (and specific form of civil rule) dictatorship was held for a temporary crisis.
more “become republican”
killing hidden waters
Groundwater is essentially nonrenewable in the arid west because the economies that exploit it cannot abide a low rate of use. By combusting nonrenewable coal and nonrenewable oil and nonrenewable natural gas, they have managed to lift nonrenewable water at incredible rates. By using water with abandon they can compete with more humid regions, where it is basically a free good. This extractive process, like the looting of ore deposits, soil, forests, and fuels, is the machinery behind the expressions “conquest of nature” and “the miracle of the deserts.” Rip away the veneer of western history and this consumption of resources links the centuries.
[and the final paragraph of the book:]
This writing has always been on the wall. It is not a revelation to learn that cheap energy makes societies boom, that groundwater in arid regions has negligible recharge, that humans tend to use as much of anything as they can lay hands on. We can ignore these facts and pump, mine, and combust with abandon, or we can recognize these facts and attempt to construct a sustainable society. There will be no painless answers, nor were there any in the past.
Bowden, Charles (2003) Killing the Hidden Waters: The Slow Destruction of Water Resources in the American Southwest. Austin: University of Texas Press.
I was not expecting what he presented, and was fascinated when he repeatedly makes the connection between levels of technological implementation and several attendant processes — the consequent overall social structure, the impact on the environment, and the absolute energy cost of the different implementation levels. Starting with indigenous tribal groups and continuing through the contemporary inhabitants in the desert Southwest, he examines the usage of a range of resources — water, fossil fuels, soil, and forests — and makes a good case for the cataclysmic risk of unsustainable use. Indeed, pointing out the obvious, he makes it clear that unsustainable use (always) ends in some kind of socio-economic collapse — perhaps deferred temporarily by substituting one resource for another — but eventually depletion precipitates a collapse. Noting a sequence of energy-coalescing advances (the horse for the Comanche Indians, fossil groundwater for the High Texas Plains (the Llano Escatado), the metal shovel for the Pima indians, etc), Bowden examines the consequences of resource exploitation via those technological advances and compares the social system both before and after access to the resource (as afforded by the technology change). Basing the view on the intrinsic energy value of the resource, he forms a powerful critique against contemporary social systems that blindly insist on technologically maximizing usage of a non-renewable resource base. It is probably necessary to be reminded that these cycles occur across any (and all) civilizations, down to rather small population groups.
Compared to my own energy-based worldview, Bowden confirmed some examples that I often use in class — where the history of civilizations may be directly correlated to the existence of one or more non-renewable resources which causes the ‘rise and fall’ of the society. The rise is facilitated when the resource-base becomes exploitable through technological advance or through simple physical access to the geographic locus of the resource followed by the subsequent fall when the access is denied or the extent of the resource is exhausted. One example I use are the British hardwood forests that, through technical advance became the basis for the construction of the British fleet which eventually defeated the Spanish fleet. When those forests were depleted, the British had no substitute for the first-growth elm and oak trees which were used for the unitary keels of ships-of-the-line. Not long after the depletion of British forests towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars, coal, a potent form of concentrated solar energy is discovered, and drove the industrial revolution. British Imperial hegemony follows the decline in this readily available coal. And, aside from a tenacious clinging to Gulf oil resources following World War I and continuing as a secondary partner to US hegemony, the British Empire is in very late decline. This example is over-simplified, but it is not difficult to make the case that a single fundamental resource or energy source or a combination of a few underlies any concentration of social power. And, conversely, it is not difficult within any social system to identify those primary sources, given that much of the attention of the social system as a whole is dedicated to the secure utilization of those resources.
hbr says
just as I had observed and inferred from bits of data that I have seen over the past few years. that the US is in serious crisis regarding the precipitous drop in the numbers of creative talent entering the country. graduate students are not turning up in droves as they used to, populating all the hard-core science, business, and technology programs at the best US universities. they are staying home or going to European, Asian, and other societies which are not so repressive and paranoid as the neoconservative fascists in power now in the US. so, reading the article “America’s Looming Creativity Crisis,” in the Harvard Business Review that enumerates the extremity of the situation only confirms my observations. empire continues its decline with the deluded self-knowledge of ascending to the millennial realms of power and righteous glory. ideological and religious dogmas constricting scientific research along with repressive and exclusionary visa and immigration practices lead the way to a rapid decline in creative capital that was once a primary mechanism in US global hegemony. in the metric introduced in the article, the Global Creative Class Index, the US already ranks behind 11 other countries, including Iceland — a statistic that somehow hasn’t reached Icelandic eyes yet, for it is sure to make front-page headlines “Icelanders More Creative Than Americans” when it does.
mushrooms
sonorous night of outside vodka partiers and raucous snoring. sharing simple spaces with others. back in a situation where 99 words in 100 are incomprehensible. so, the exhausting state of contextualizing everything, with little-to-no results. recalls first visits in Iceland and Finland. where now comfortable meaning is heard in those places, here is that discomfort. especially in unstable living and logistic situations.
a hike to the highest dune where there is a huge sundial covered in runes, installed in 1991. the top granite pedestal, the solar pointer, is broken off and lies smashed across the circle of granite blocks that forms the face of the dial on the ground — from a storm in 1996. there are pathways everywhere, some adding to the sense of un-natural erosion and human presence. no trees are left to lie in the woods if they fall by storm or disease, so the natural infrastructure, for example, soil development, is a bit hampered, though the whole of the island is technically a National Park. I park myself on a variety of locations to soak up the ambiance, one place, sitting half-way out on a breakwater pier (to record the odd sound of waves skimming the side of the concrete). an elderly gentleman wanders up, looking as much like the images of an old Karl Marx as is possible, with a bit of white-haired Fidel Castro mixed in. he is with his daughter, who stays behind at the shore. they are there for memory, that is clear. bodies mapping old pathways and places from youth. there they were, a younger man with his daughter, a child, playing on this same beach, the trees different, the world hosting a different set of human empires, principalities, and powers. he comes to me, and asks something in Russian to which I reply in English that I don’t speak Russian, he then asks in German if I speak German, so I reply in German him that I am an American artist, he reacts with interested surprise, but speaks no English, so, smiling, walks to the far end of the breakwater to stand for a bit. his daughter finally joins him and together they chat with the lone fisherman who seems to be without much luck. the couple, young and old, walk slowly back to the beach, I tip my hat to him as he approaches, he salutes me, and pats my shoulder as he shuffles past. human connection.
mushrooms are the focus of much of the day. Alvydas has gathered several bags full, so we spend a couple hours cleaning them — peeling the top skin off and making sure there are no decaying parts.
I make a presentation for the students late in the evening that is followed by some difficult questioning provoked by my fragmentary and discontinuous comments about energy and art, and the live remix that I effect as an opening sample of my work on the projector.
this is followed by platefuls of the mushrooms with potatoes that have been carefully boiled and spiced. mmmMMMMmmmmm.
transformative reactions
arrive the night before Valentine’s Day in Kiel following the first European workshop of the Second Nomadic Phase. if things proceed like this all the time, there is no going back to the core of Empire, in retro vision, it is too corrupt. is this too simplistic a diagnosis? maybe, but the energy flow patterns in that set of structures is … oh hell, can’t describe it, it’s just a bunch of abstracted words.
anyway, Christian brings Steffi flowers last night. Valentine’s Day. I bring some Lübecker marzipan.
yeah, reflecting back on the two weeks, I had forgotten how powerful dialogues can be when there are engaged individuals at both ends. the system in Boulder exerts such a high degree of psychic pressure on the students (and faculty) that the conditions for humane dialogue are almost impossible to achieve. they need some breathing space of chaos — or some a root ground that feeds any contingency of flow. if the degree of insistent social flow-framework is too rigid, then there is no possibility of inspiring breath. and there is suffocation. embedded in the situation at ISNM is, for now, a degree of chaos that is not particularly uncomfortable, but it is at least available.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed. — Karl Jung, hanging in Frieder and Susi’s kitchen
scoring
score. life goes the right direction, so it seems. university faculty housing comes through, a relatively inexpensive apartment for the academic year. car is now registered in Colorado, drivers license is next. maybe even re-registering to vote, after the long hiatus of cynical attitude and expatriate status. but voting only to stick it to the folks who engineered the coup d’etat in the previous presidential election. the results don’t really matter anyway, as the core of the empire, the ranks and ranks surrounding the centers of power “inside the Beltway” are rotten and corrupt.
I penetrate the earth and sustain creatures by my strength; becoming Soma, the liquid of moonLight, I nurture all healing herbs.
I am the universal fire within the body of living beings; I work with the flow of vital breath to digest the foods that men consume.
I dwell deep in the heart of everyone; memory, knowledge, and reasoning come from me I am the object to be known through all sacred lore; and I am its knower, the creator of its final truth.
— Lord Krishna
— Lord Krishna
post-Imperiality
over and out. there from Sredniy Prospekt 25, near the Metro Vasilevstrovskaya, on Vasilyevsky Island not far from the central campus of St. Petersburg University. the last evening of the lecture. walking around the city this morning, the KunstCamera of Peter the Great. what an individual he was. doing everything, insatiable appetite for life. building material monuments to Empire. now it is post-empire. infrastructure only just barely maintaining the massive and ubiquitous monuments, streets, palaces, museums, and cathedrals. what comes after Empire? is that decay the inevitable result when the inflow of energy sources dries up, when command and control weakens, when chaos descends bit by bit?
Lev’s edifice
Lev was suggesting that the skyscraper was the ultimate (or crucial) symbolic and real social expression of the Industrial Age, and, in the course of his fascinating lecture, pondered what might be the crucial expression of the Information Age. immediately my thoughts went to the concept of LifeStyle as being that edifice — LifeStyle becomes the penultimate expression of the consumer society. this false edifice of success(-full) surrender to a socially mandated norm or behavior. the vapid Look of it all.
and what about creativity — too much attention paid to aspects or results of it — and no observations that is is a continuous, (NOT sporadic) and peak experience. and, at the same time, it is cyclic. and it involves both the creative and destructive principles. it is not a commodity. it is harmonic, balanced from all scalable viewpoints and sensual contacts.
some notes I wrote later:
In this era there are (pseudo)nomads who dance around the monuments of the global information age. These monuments — status, wealth, and power — together combine in a single ever-shape-shifting edifice with no seam, no crack, but with the seductive and bewildering attraction of Joseph’s Technicolor mantle aLight and burning with the fire in Plato’s cave. The edifice is Life-Style. Its ornamentation is Fashion.
more “Lev’s edifice”
arrival
When the gaps in these notes are so large, there is a distinct lack of continuity between here and there. When the here’s have been so many, and the now’s are rapid and brimming with the negation of writing: life, empty space becomes the content. And the there’s are forgotten. Heading to new lands. New and old friends. Riga, after exactly twenty-four hours of travel. From Lapland to Riga. Flights, if you had good connections would take about five hours total. But connections never seem to be good here on the perimeter. Tornio was a short week of snowy brilliance, a couple hard workouts, running to the pool, not so far away, but enough to make me feel like I need to push body against the barriers that make it uncomfortable. Running to the pool, swimming hard for 30 – 40 minutes, running home. After taking the time for a sauna, of course. Yeah, in a train now, so time for a few reflections: No more short teaching gigs in the next year. Minimum of two weeks, with preference for four. The idea of doing six one-month workshops at different places seems very appealing. Then the balance of time in the southwest of the US? Can it really work? Time is passing so quickly that dreams run away. Only just now arrived. Twenty-four hours full on the road. Getting too old for this kind of action, but where will it cease? Movement was quite a bit easier than I had thought here at the border of the Evil Empire. But the atmosphere has that tinge, an edge of desolation somehow, a bit of wildness. Flatness. Arrested construction — the Soviet could not concentrate enough energy to bring the society to a point of self-sustained possibility for its members. So it goes. Riding the bus from Tallinn. The landscape is peaceful smooth, not so extreme as Finland, already enough south to get away from that edge feeling. Though Tornio seems always familiar despite the extremity. Mountains of snow lining all the streets. Impressions. The first moment in E-Lab here in Riga. I’m early, I caught an earlier bus leaving from the harbor in Tallinn. Rasa and Raitis are not here in the moment, so I wait and write instead. Overlooking the river. A dark gray-green monument to a struggle sits below on the bank of the river near the railroad bridge, two figures fighting something that is invisible, something over there, downstream.
hip, cool, and ripped-off
logging into the past. first I drop Loki off at school for a greatly shortened day that seems to be only a special pageant for the entire student body. 90 minutes. I go back home to read several weeks of nettime email. which gets me to this stage of needing to write here. photometry. grammetics. and new media is nothing more than more of the same. networked things – smeckworked things. learning in cyberspace, doing in cyberspace, personal technology begins/continues the inexorable involuted backfire on itself. but only personal technology. something to shoot back with. Corpo-tech, or mili-tech won’t cease. because selling and killing will have a greater field of action in the future. the mistake of all the applied technology hype is that it forgets the original interface — soul/body. where the ether jacks into the meat. all mediated things root in and then fly from this electro-colloidal fertilization-zone. all reason and form and metaphor and absolute can be searched, can be hunted in this zone. can then be copied, pasted into relevant organic categories. that’s it, the Confucian Analects that sends us through a process of searching the perimeter of the soul/body interface.
The men of old, wanting to clarify and diffuse throughout the empire that Light which comes from looking straight into the heart and then acting, first set up good government in their own states; wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves; desiring self-discipline, they rectified their own hearts; and wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought precise verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts (the tones given off by the heart) ; wishing to attain precise verbal definitions, they set to extend their knowledge to the utmost.
This completion of knowledge is rooted in sorting things into organic categories
— Confucius, from The Great Digest or The Unwobbling Pivot, translated by Ezra Pound
it is possible to consider all things to be simple. complexity is a result of over-thought. over-processing of even the most simple data-set creates sampling artifacts, noise, and confusion. borders fabricate, delta-functions shoot to zero or infinity (the paralysis of alienated polarization), surfaces distort. convolution with questionable concepts creates complete areas of synthetic fabrication replete with discontinuities and false event horizons. forget metaphors, jam poetry, and all cultural production machinery paradigms, swallow language, stop writing. stop beating flesh against time and space barriers that make it hurt. no sex for entertainment: no time-slot filler, no wet commerce. body looks soft for a reason. that reason is coddling. ways of going that treat body/soul interface as a bother, not the crux (what is crux — old ancient forgotten word — is there a new word to fill the spot where this was forgotten and once lodged? maybe the word that fills it is catalytic converter or simm or talk-show). there are so many substitution fonts that language can be forgotten anyway. because people are knowing less and less exactly or even generally what each other is saying. no hearing, no talking. only dumb silence while fingernails grow to stab palms. while genetic receptors are mapped (where’s life?). and while questions are asked that raise a cryogenic boiling fog that dissipates to nothing after awhile. hip. cool. and ripped-off.