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While, overall, the London Underground works a lot better than the NYC subway system (how many times did I wait for 15 minutes for the F at Bergen? Waiting 15 minutes here would lead you to think that something terrible had happened topside) I do definitely miss the MTA design elements. Labelling things with single letters and numbers will always, always beat giving them (often political freighted) names, just as numbering streets will always be more modern and wonderful than all those dead folks clotting up our maps and making everything vastly more difficult to navigate. And placing those letters and numbers in sharply colored circles redoubles the fun…

The picture above is from a very nice post on Christoph Niemann’s NYT blog. Sometimes it seems like the only true barometer of things worth keeping in this world - especially when the aesthetics of everyday life are concerned - are things that are worthy of childhood obsessions.

A young man whose English is of rather recent vintage has been coming around just about every other day in a very sharp if cheap suit to knock on our door and educate us on the amazing opportunities to save! big! bucks! via energy deregulation. He’s caught me in moments of rage in my sleepy clothes (rage re: the previous post) and yesterday he woke up my daughter after my wife had painstakingly gotten her down for a nap so that she could get some work in.

We tell him to come back later, every time he knocks, but yesterday he caught me coming in from a smoke on the street and I got to hear the pitch. I had a bit of trouble making out what he was exactly talking about, what he was selling - I think electricty, from some company that’s not British Gas, which is what we’ve got. But what I could make out - and christ if he didn’t say the word six or seven times in the course of his 90 second pitch - was deregulation. I had not heard of deregulation, had I? I did not know what deregulation was, did I, and that what it was was an opportunity for me to save several pence per unit on my electricity consumption? Did I know that deregulation afforded me choice, unprecedented choice, whereas in previous years, the years Before Deregulation, I was forced to simply pay the rate they wanted me to pay for my energy?

It made me think of Conrad, actually, though almost everything nowadays does:

“I went to work the next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that station. In that way only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the redeeming facts of life. Still, one must look about sometimes; and then I saw this station, these men strolling aimlessly about in the sunshine of the yard. I asked myself sometimes what it all meant. They wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.

I guess Enron, not just its final implosion but more the summer of rolling blackouts that it orchestrated in California in 2000 (see the last paragraphs here) wasn’t as big a story over here. But then again, I guess you can still here the pitch back home - more to would-be pyramid scheme early-entryists than to end users, but still…

Perhaps that’s the sort of video my young travelling salesman friend has seen. Perhaps that’s what he’s up to. I love the part about the “greatest redistribution of wealth ever seen in our nation.” There’s a specter haunting America, the specter of infotainment driven microenronbots knocking on yr doors, redistributing yr wealths…

Mine is a bit more perverse perhaps and frontminded, but I think there are actually tons and tons of people who share a tendency to stick with what once were state-run monopoly operators out of a set of wholly comprehensible (if often, now, illusory) reasons. Nostalgia for simplicity and security would probably lead the pack. It drives the slimy-laissez fairists mad, the unwillingness to take the time to consider our options in full (maybe set a weekend aside to go over our literature and those of our competitors with your spouse) and to be brave and self-standing enough to take the great leap forward into market choice! This tendency - see this clip for an interesting case study - is again something that might well be a popular instinct with potential to be activated into something useful indeed.

So one of the tidbits that travels back from american expats in the uk, and has for a long time, is the incredible asskicking difficulty of getting phone/internet/tv set up here. Ah, I thought, I am patient. I have a phone that gets email, and the tv gets freeview, and there’s internet at my office, so I will be so angelically calm through the weeklong wait.

Weeklong wait, weeklong wait. If only a weeklong wait.

Let me confirm what those previous expats have said. This is no fun. First, the broadband cable people (company named after a pre-sexual condition, or one who is in that condition) find the fiber-optic leash is snapped in the street, and would take digging, so I cancelled and stuffed politics to one side and went instead with the fascist operators named after the blue (gray, here) dome above us, who came today and can’t because, um, there’s reno scaffolding next door in front, and the neighbor’s new loft blocks the back, and they won’t do chimney’s because that is dangerous and so I cancelled them out too.

So now, apparently, on to my oxygeny mobile phone operator, once the telecom monopoly of espana, now just some random post-privatization conglomerate. They are cheap; they have promised access within 6 to 10 days; we will see about that.

One day, though, one day, my friends and readers, I will blog again during the sliver of time I devote to this sort of thing in the evenings.

But for now, and there’s a lot more to come on this from me soon, I hope: let’s think about advertisements for socialism. Not placards or prints or tv spots in this case, but policy and institutions that both are themselves socialist and encourages people to think well of public ownership and provision, to turn against the private sphere as corrupt and inefficient, impossibly bureaucratic (despite the incessant promises of efficiency and cost-effectiveness). Let’s think about what, say, wide-scale public wifi would do for our movement, and the reasons why it’s been for the most part prevented so far, and why exactly it’s proven so difficult for us to article the utter insanity of blocking access to something everyone, everyone would agree would be a wonderful thing simply in order to maintain an inefficiently organized market for these services.

“Yeah, we used to pay for internet access. It was crazy - crazy expensive and a pain in the ass to get fixed. Now it’s just there….”

(You can substitute medical care, eduction, effective and clean transport, housing, entertainment, books, whatever you like for “internet access.” It is, like almost every other political problem, an Overton Window issue… We’ve had rather nice but uncosmopolitan americans staying with us this week, first time international travellers. It’s so fun telling them about flat rate prescriptions - free for kids! - from the NHS and the like… If you’re a jaded britainian, let me recommend hosting middle-class americans for memphis for a week - it’ll show you full well how much is still left here, despite it all, that’s worth fighting for…)

Relatedly, I am beginning to think that the real and ultimate source of the incredibly hot antipathy that the Bush administration has for Hugo Chavez - why they (to all appearances) intervene in Venezuela’s affairs, elevate him to AofE stature, and all the rest - isn’t because he calls names, or even because he threatens to play games with the oil supply, but simply because he raises the specter of a solution to the world’s economic and perhaps even envirnomental crises so glaringly obvious and in the end simple and really with ample precident, that it is bound to start occurring in the minds of the US citizenry, popping up like little thought bubbles as they fill their tanks the morning after hearing news reports of the absolutely insane profit reports on tv the night before. That is, HC nationalized the oil industry in VZ. He thought and did the utterly thinkable that must somehow remain unthinkable, beyond the pale, lest wonderfulness break out all over and spoil the fun of dark times for those with a stake in dark times.

Too much too quickly and in the wrong order, but I’ve been thinking that we might want to be more specific about what it is that we propose, move away from amorphous think-good amelioration and nostalgia and, you know, pick a bit that seems important. I vote the communalization (used to be nationalization before I fixed it) of things. Services, maybe industries, and the like. This will be way too quick, really flimsy and insubstantial, but while watching this the other night, the part where it gets to Thatcher and the privatization horrors, Marr emphasized the way that one privatization would, in a sense, pay for the next. I wonder if that (and given all different senses of the word “pay”) mightn’t run in reverse as well. And I finally wonder if the window of opportunity hasn’t already begun to open, what with Northern Rock and almost inevitably the american airlines within a year or so, and we’ll see what comes next.

Start whispering it around to your friends and neighbors. We could have them, given the right turn of events, by force majeure. That is to say, we might have to have them. State of emergency and all….

From the New York Times this weekend:

On many budget matters, Mrs. Clinton’s instincts seem similar to her husband’s. Both favor carefully crafted tax credits that can help people who most need it, that come with relatively modest price tags and that seem likely to survive a divided Congress.

Mr. Obama sometimes talks of his vision of an “iPod government,” with simple programs that people can understand. He also talks of persuading voters and members of Congress, including Republicans, to support his plans.

Ah, whether through coyly rendered insight or dumb luck, the reporter here is on to something in the arrangement of these two paragraphs. The policy opposite of an “iPod government,” in the best possible case of what that might mean is in fact the system (a mainstay of neo-liberal regimes of the last decade or so) of shifting from direct social disbursements to the tax credit form of funds delivery. Google around for “unrecovered tax credits” and you’ll see why this might be the case.

You might start with the wikipedia article on the Earned Income Tax Credit, which includes the following paragraphs:

Millions of American families who are eligible for the EITC do not receive it, leaving billions of additional tax credit dollars unclaimed. Research by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Internal Revenue Service indicates that between 15% and 25% of households who are entitled to the EITC do not claim their credit, or between 3.5 million and 7 million households.

The average EITC amount received per family in 2002 was $1,766. Using this figure and a 15% unclaimed rate would mean that low-wage workers and their families lost out on more than $6.5 billion, or more than $12 billion if the unclaimed rate is 25%.

To translate this into UKese, look here. And here’s a graphical representation (what else?) of just why the EITC is a symptom of a politics of neo-liberal complexity, rather than true socialist simplicity:

Easy enough to figure out what’s coming to you, eh? Try it yourself to see. This is the “survival of the fittest” version of the welfare state, designed to fail. Born of actuarial anticipation rather than humane and good faith efforts to help. Perhaps most important of all, even if it does work, it’s designed in such a way that almost no one can understand how it works, or even what it is in the first place. But this too is the point, for if the citizenry was to move about with a sense that they in any sense are thought to be entitled to a living, well…. we simply can’t have that, those are waters that we don’t dare to sail into, etc etc…

Sadly, I’ve not really seen any signs that Obama actually means to take the project of (best case) iPod governmentality up. I suppose there’s more to say - about the difference between best and worst case simplicity, what lies between those poles, and what in the end I think all this might mean… As always more to come…

I’ve read just about all the Flaubert criticism there is to read that’s available in English, and lots that’s not. But Jacques Rancière’s “Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed,” published recently in Critical Inquiry, might just be, pound for pound, the best I’ve ever read. (I apologize if you don’t have access to the journal one way or another). I’ve got lots to say about it, but will for tonight mostly just quote a bit to give you a taste. 

The fictional definition of Emma is in keeping with the big concern of the 1850s and 60s that was encapsulated in one word: excitement. At that time in France, the diagnosis could be heard everywhere at every time; society suffered from a fatal disease that affected the social order and individ- ual behaviors as well. It had become an unrelenting turmoil of thoughts and desires, appetites and frustrations. In the good old times of monarchy, religion, and aristocracy, there had been a clear, long-standing hierarchy that put every group and every individual in its right place. It gave them a firm footing and limited horizons, which are the conditions of happiness for poor people. Unfortunately that order had been shattered, first by the French Revolution, second by the rise of industrialism, third by the new media—the newspapers, lithographs, and so on, which made words and images, dreams and aspirations, available everywhere to anybody. Society had become a hustle and bustle of free and equal individuals that were dragged together into a ceaseless whirl in search of an excitement that was nothing but the mere internalization of the endless and purposeless agitation of the whole social body.

Such was the discourse of the notables and the learned persons. What must draw our attention is the synonym they gave for that excitement. That synonym was democracy. They had first met democracy in the shape of the government of the people, the government of free and equal citizens, where the rulers and the ruled people are one and the same. Needless to say, they had efficiently worked during the French Second Republic (1848–51) to crush the threat of democratic anarchy, at the cost of handing over their own freedom to a new emperor. But it was not enough to crush it by force. They had to annul its political significance, make it a mere sociological phe- nomenon. Therefore a new democratic ghost was substituted for the older; political democracy, they said, had been crushed, but there was a new, far more radical uprising of democracy that no police, no army could tear down: the uprising of the multitude of aspirations and desires, cropping up everywhere in all the pores of modern society. To be sure, the idea was not exactly new; Plato had invented it two millennia before by stating that democracy, in fact, was not a form of government but the way of life of those “free” Athenians who cared for nothing except their individual pleasure. The modern antidemocrats translated it into a more dramatic version, as the uprising of the multitude of unleashed social atoms, greedy to enjoy everything that was enjoyable: gold, indeed, and all the things that gold can buy, but also, what was worse, all that gold cannot buy—passions, values, ideals, art, and literature. Such was the big trouble as they saw it. It would be a lesser evil if poor people only wanted to get rich. Poor people are sup- posed to be “practically minded.” But poor people were now taking a new view of what practical-mindedness meant. They wanted to enjoy all that was enjoyable, including ideal pleasures. But they also wanted those ideal pleasures to be practically enjoyable ideal pleasures. 

For those who come upon Flaubert’s book, Emma Bovary is the frightening incarnation of that desire. She craves ideal romance and physical love. She constantly negotiates between material and ideal sources of excitement. When she has resisted her love for Leon, she thinks that she deserves a reward. She buys a piece of furniture. And not any piece of furniture: a gothic prie-dieu. This is what respectable persons perceive as the law of democracy, the law of universal equivalence: anybody can exchange any desire for any other desire. A critic sums it up as follows: “Madame Bovary, this means the pathological overexcitement of senses and imagination in dissatisfied democracy.” That would be a good reason for sentencing her to death. But respectable persons are not asked to judge Emma; they are only asked to judge her inventor. The first person who has an interest in killing her is Flaubert. Besides the trial of the writer, there is the trial that the writer mounts against his character. Besides the evil that frightens respectable persons, there is the evil done to literature by Emma, which means the evil that he wants her to do, that he embodies in Emma.

Perhaps you can sense where he’s headed with all this… The anxious war of Art vs. the aestheticization of everyday life as the battle between Flaubert and his creation, but it’s even more complex than a reactionary defense of privileged access to the aesthetic, as the aesthetic in question, the aesthetic perhaps proposed by Flaubert in Bovary is one that itself resists hierarchy, the oldest hierarchies that define the shape of art, and not just the shape of art. 

There is one person who could have explained it to Emma. Unfortunately it is the person whom you are not supposed to meet in a convent. It is the Devil. Before writing Madame Bovary, Flaubert had written the first version of his Temptation of Saint Anthony. The devil that tempted Saint Anthony was much cleverer and much more generous than the old nuns in the convent. He gave him the explanation of “mystic languor” as he dragged him on an aerial journey through space. He made him discover what life truly is when our sensations are released from the chains of individuality. With his help, the saint could discover strange forms of preindividual or impersonal life: “inanimate existences, inert things that seem animal, vegetative souls, statues that dream and landscapes that think.”5 In such a world our mind loses all its conventional bearings. It bursts into atoms of thought that come into unity with things that have themselves burst into a dance of atoms. The Devil reminded the saint that he had already felt that experience of fusion between the inside and the outside: “Often, because of anything at all, a drop of water, a shell, a strand of hair, you have stopped short, your eyes fixed and your heart open. The object you were gazing at seemed to encroach upon you, as you bent toward, and new ties were found: you clutched each other, you touched each other by subtle innumerable embraces.”6 

Those “subtle innumerable embraces,” those shells, strands of hair, and drops of water, together with sunrays, breaths of air, and grains of sand or dust whipped up by the wind make up the sensory framework of Madame Bovary. They are the real events of the novel. Every time that something happens in the fiction—notably the birth of a love—they are the real content of the event, the real cause of the emotion. Let us remember what happens when Charles first falls for Emma: “The draught beneath the door blew a little dust over the flagstones, and he watched it creep along” (B, p.35). 

When Emma falls for Rodolphe, she perceives little gleams of gold about his pupils, smells a perfume of lemon and vanilla, and looks at the long plume of dust raised by the stagecoach. And when she first falls for Leon, “weeds streamed out in the limpid water like green wigs tossed away. Now and then some fine-legged insects alighted on the tip of a reed or crawled over a water-lily leaf. The sunshine darted its rays through the little blue bubbles on the wavelets that kept forming and breaking” (B, p.107).

This is what happens: “little blue bubbles” on wavelets in the sunshine, or swirls of dust raised by the wind. This is what the characters feel and what makes them happy: a pure flood of sensations. Much later, the Proustian narrator will evoke the message addressed by the sensation to the person that it strikes, a message that he will sum up as follows: “Try to solve the riddle of happiness which I set you.”7 But the Flaubertian characters don’t solve the riddle. They don’t even understand what kind of happiness can be enclosed in swirls of dust and bubbles on wavelets. They want those microevents to be linked together in a real plot. They want the swirls and bubbles to be turned into properties of real things that can be desired and possessed, into features of individuals that they can love and who can love them. From the point of view of the writer, they don’t mistake art for life. They mistake one art for another and one life for another. They mistake one art for another; this means that they are still trapped in the old poetics with its combinations of actions, its characters envisioning great ends, its feelings related to the qualities of persons, its noble passions opposed to everyday experience, and so on. They are out of step with the new poetics that has shattered the hierarchical poetics of action in favor of an “egaliarian” poetics of life. This also means that they mistake one life for another. They still perceive a world of subjects and predicates, things and qualities, wills, ends and means. They think that things and persons have qualities that individualize them and make them desirable and enjoyable. In short, they think that life is defined by aims and purposes. They have not listened to the lesson of the Devil: life has no purpose. It is an eternal flood of atoms that keeps doing and undoing in new configurations. 

This is brilliant stuff, but there’s one thing perhaps that I’d tweak or add or augment. These micro-events that Rancière so persuasively describes are also a matter of time - they are time images, visual manifestations of the passage of time. The blowing of the dust, the movements of the insects - these events are a matter of a new, secular temporality that, like the aesthetic involved in their encapsulation in the novel, is incompatible with standard narrative forms. (Sometimes I call these temporality the anti-ephiphanic, other times simply the everyday. I comes to the same thing, in the end…) Novels can light on these moments, but novels cannot stay - and a novel made entirely of them (of course this happened, in a sense, later, with Woolf and others) simply does not work as a novel, does not do what a novel is supposed to do.

More to be said, of course…  

From the introduction of J. M. Coetzee’s Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1997)

Innocence is a state in which we try to maintain our children; dignity is a state we claim for ourselves. Affronts to the innocence of our children or to the dignity of our persons are attacks not upon our essential being but upon constructs—constructs by which we live, but constructs nevertheless. This is not to say that affronts to innocence or dignity are not real affronts, or that the outrage with which we respond to them is not real, in the sense of not being sincerely felt. The infringements are real; what is infringed, however, is not our essence but a foundational fiction to which we more or less wholeheartedly subscribe, a fiction that may well be indispensable for a just society, namely, that human beings have a dignity that sets them apart from animals and consequently protects them from being treated like animals. (It is even possible that we may look forward to a day when animals will have their own dignity ascribed to them, and the ban will be reformulated as a ban on treating a living creature like a thing.)

The fiction of dignity helps to define humanity and the status of humanity helps to define human rights. There is thus a real sense in which an affront to our dignity strikes at our rights. Yet when, outraged at such affront, we stand on our rights and demand redress, we would do well to remember how insubstantial the dignity is on which those rights are based. Forgetting where our dignity comes from, we may fall into a posture as comical as that of the irate censor.

Life, says Erasmus’s Folly, is theater: we each have lines to say and a part to play. One kind of actor, recognizing that he is in a play, will go on playing nevertheless; another kind of actor, shocked to find he is participating in an illusion, will try to step off the stage and out of the play. The second actor is mistaken. For there is nothing outside the theater, no alternative life one can join instead. The show is, so to speak, the only show in town. All one can do is to go on playing one’s part, though perhaps with a new awareness, a comic awareness.

We thus arrive at a pair of Erasmian paradoxes. A dignity worthy of respect is a dignity without dignity (which is quite different from unconscious or unaffected dignity); an innocence worthy of respect is an innocence without innocence. As for respect itself, it is tempting to suggest that this is a superfluous concept, though for the workings of the theater of life it may turn out to be indispensable. True respect is a variety of love and may be subsumed under love; to respect someone means, inter alia, to forgive that person an innocence that, outside the theater, would be false, a dignity that would be risible.

Dangerous and interesting this, more to come, and perhaps something on why I like the constructions X without Xs, Xwithout Y, etc quite as much as I do….

Nice article on Yugoslav socialist computer art at metamute.

It’s no surprise that the folllowing fliers from The Camp for Climate Action (who seem to be running the Heathrow protests…) would appeal to me:

Holy crap, do I want one of these.

I’m going to post more about this later, I think, with a bit more heft and a bit less raw fetishistical attachment. But my wife would never, ever let me buy one. At least I don’t think she would. But land is really cheap around here, even some gorgeous lakefront type stuff, nestled amidst vineyards and apple orchards. But I’d like electricity and water. Where do you pee, let alone poo? Maybe it’s not for me.

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Absolutely amazing moment today on tv. I had heard that Cormac McCarthy was going to be on Oprah to discuss The Road - which seemed like an unlikely and interesting thing to see so I taped the show. But as it turned out, the McCarthy section was by far less interesting than the first segment, which featured Michael Moore discussing his new movie about the American health care situation, Sicko.

The moment when it felt like the ground was giving way beneath my feet comes about 1:30 into this video (which is bound not to last on-line, so get it while the getting’s good)…

(The video is, as I predicted, now gone…)

Here’s a transcript of the exchange in question:

O:

OK this is what I was going to say about the film - that I got it in a way that I hadn’t gotten it before. Now don’t you love when that happens. When you just go “Ooo! I got it!” Because you know the word “socialism” really stirs up…

MM:

[Scarily] Socialized Medicine…

O:

Socialized Medicine

MM:

[Scarily] Ooo…

O: And then when you showed the example of [how] we have socialized activities in this country. The fire department - we don’t pay for a fire department. We don’t pay for the police department. We don’t pay for public schools.

MM:

And it’s universal.

O:

We don’t pay for the library. And it’s universal - universal is for everybody.

MM:

Right.

O:

And so the very idea of extending that to the care of people is really something that I have to honestly say that I hadn’t thought about it because I’m one of those people, “I got mine,” so I wasn’t thinking about who didn’t have theirs. Really. Right.

MM:

And we don’t expect the fire department to turn a profit. It would be an appalling thought, and the reason we don’t is because it’s a life and death issue. Well, health care is a life and death issue.

O:

Yeah.

MM:

And that’s why turning a profit has to be removed from the system.

Good Christ, that’s amazing. The slow but distinct re-discovery of what that word, “socialism,” might mean by a figure obviously not associated with words like that. The discovery that we already very much have elements of it all around us, elements that we would never willingly part with. The emergence that a better synonym for “socialism” would be “universality,” rather than “Stalinism” or “gulag” or “bread-lines” that it’s usually equated with, when it’s mentioned at all, in the US. The revelation of the fact that “socialism” in fact provides very simple, but persuasive answers to issues that only at first seem incredibly complex, impossible to repair, and as if natural, inevitable features of our sociopolitical landscape.

In short, I think this little episode renders abundantly clear why exactly socialized medicine is such an important - perhaps the important - issue today in the US. Just as the right has own Overton Window games that they’ve long played with school prayer and vouchers and the like, a nation with a public medical system funded by even a large fractional amount that the US currently spends on health care today would be a nation on its way, I believe, toward a whole branching set of public sector reinvestments.

And it further, Moore’s appearance on Oprah puts to shame ten thousand cute and clever forms of aestheticized intervention - simple, spirited explanation may have set us on a path toward improvement that no act of detournement or deconstruction, no dialectical ruse, nor metatextual abyssalism could accomplish.

This is a sobering, yet inspiring thing to realize, if you’re someone who does what I do for a living.

I’ve really liked Michael Moore for a long time, but he is now officially one of the patron saints of this blog.

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A nice piece on the future of the left and the “social state” from Zygmunt Bauman in the journal Soundings (not a journal that I’ve seen before… but it looks interesting…) I’ll give away the end:

Contrary to the assumption of ‘third way’ advocates, loyalty to the social state tradition and an ability to modernise swiftly - with little or no damage to social cohesion and solidarity - need not be at loggerheads. On the contrary, as the social democratic practice of our Nordic neighbours has demonstrated, the pursuit of a more socially cohesive society is the necessary precondition for modernisation by consent. The Scandinavian pattern is anything but a relic of the past. Just how topical and alive its underlying principles are, and how strong its possibilities for inspiring human imagination and action, is demonstrated by the recent triumphs of emergent or resurrected social states in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil and Chile. Gradually yet indefatigably they are changing the political likeness and popular mood of the Western Hemisphere. They bear the hallmarks of that ‘left hook’ with which, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, all truly decisive blows in human history tend to be delivered. And though this is a truth that is hard to perceive in a Britain that is sunk in the murky dusk of the Blairist era, it is the truth nevertheless.

Still, aren’t both Sweden and Denmark currently run by center-right liberalizing governments? Shouldn’t we be anxious that the Scandinavians themselves are starting to feel that the “Scandinavian pattern” is a relic of the past?

UPDATE: Uh oh…

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So you end up broken in half, as a student of modernism, by the split in the period and in its emblematic works. On the one hand, the hyper-psychologized dystopias of individual complexity and political ineffability. On the other, the union of form and function under a banner of progress (even real progress). The former is the reflexive stance of the modernist literary text; the later, of modernist architecture and design. Think Joyce vs. Corbusier. Woolf vs. Niemeyer, Kafka vs. Tiege. You find the architectural / progressive motif more attractive - more potentially useful today - as a seed for revivification. But, on the other hand, you work with literature - this is what you do for a living.

It is tough to mine the latter from the former, the simple from the complex, the beautiful utility from the gratingly indifferent. It is tough to find, in short, the other modernism in literary texts. After all, literature doesn’t love hopeful contentment, and work (vs. dark dreamlife) toward that end - and most of all, it does not love utopia, whether actual or anticipated, whether exuberant or fadedly just OK.

Or maybe it’s just you, er, that is, me, as Owen Hatherley has found it hiding in plain sight in a J.G. Ballard’s Vermilion Sands.

[T]here is only one instance of a speculative community approaching a Ballardian ideal – a site where we definitively leave the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the cautionary, anti-Modernist dystopia – and that is in Vermilion Sands. This is a 1971 collection of stories spanning his first published story, ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956) to 1970, all set in the same community: a dead or dying desert resort, populated entirely by the elegantly, wanly idle, most of whom are involved in strangely calm psychodramas. Vermilion Sands is a synthetic and synaesthetic landscape of psychotropic houses that respond to their inhabitants’ desires and fears, singing sculptures, and a place where everything in sight seems to glitter, to take on the qualities of crystal, a flickering chromaticism suffusing everything from stairways to hair colour and eye pigments. It is, as Ballard writes in the 1971 introduction, a picture of an ideal he wanted and expected to see realised. The dystopian tradition is refuted in this introduction: ‘very few attempts (in SF) have been made to visualise a unique and self-contained future that contains no warnings to us. Perhaps because of this cautionary tone, so many of science fiction’s notional futures are zones of unrelieved grimness.’ So could there be here a sort of affirmative retort to the insistence that all Modernist or utopian communities inevitably end up in dystopia?

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I’ve loved this ad - even though it was for an energy company - for quite a long time. Always seemed to me to be potentially open for repurposing and.. I really love modularity, just in general. (We see an English version here, of course…)

But lo and behold, the other day when I thought to go to youtube to check if it was available for me to suck down into my archive, I found this:

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I am so lucky that exactly three weeks from today, I am going to be in Amsterdam, just a short train ride away from this. (If I need you to, would you be willing to write my wife to explain exactly why it is so absolutely necessary for us to pack up the kiddo and leave gorgeous Amsterdam - where we’ll only be as of now for two full days - to head to Den Haag?)

I learned of it via an excellent article today on metamute by Marina Vishmidt, which gets quite a lot succinctly right about Neurath:

Although the classical logitical positivist statement remains Wittgenstein’s ‘the world is everything which is the case’ , the Vienna Circle was not always confined to the ideological quietism that could be deduced from that statement. Neurath’s work combined pragmatism with a utopian orientation, a drive to represent ‘things as they are’ in the hope that revolutionary progress would make out of them things of the past. The Marxist ethics behind the ISOTYPE project complemented the kinds of formal innovations – images built of numbers, standard templates, seriality – that structure the internet, another vision of universal information, albeit one without a clear ideological mission. The disambiguation of social contradictions as a premise for a materialist design practice is one of the questions that After Neurath: Like Sailors on the Open Sea tries to address in the format of an exhibition but also of a year and a half-long programme of research, symposia, and smaller exhibitions. The allure and shortcomings of a universal grammar is another, with the connotation that it is both a dream of reason and a bold proposition for engineering social change.

UPDATE: Oh for christ’s sake. The exhibition is off - ended in April. Whatever. Glad I figured this out before I got on the train to Den Haag….

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A famous passage from Joyce’s Portrait:

The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

The ambiguity of literary modernism’s dream of “impersonal” art is brilliantly captured in the stringing together of “invisible” and “refined out of existence.” Can’t, of course, be both at the same time: either the artist is there but hidden or has actually been wrung out of the work. The oscillation between egotistical artistic supremacy and the “death of the author” is one of the rhythms that define the progression of this period’s work.

I tend to be more interested in the “no artist” side of the issue than the other, because I think a good bit of what utopian / progressivist tendencies or even side effects there are to be found in the works of such figures as Joyce and Beckett, Woolf and Proust are to be found there. And I’m also very interested in the legacy of this preoccupation on the part of the “high modernists.”

One place that we find its development, of course, are in all of the strategies of opening works to contingency and randomness practiced by fellow modernists and figures that are usually affiliated with later schools / periods. Automatic writing, from Yeats through the surrealists and onward. Burroughs’s cut-ups. All sorts of “found art” tactics. Often enough, these techniques are staked either on the “unconscious” as the black box that generates the disorder or the disorder as the means that gives access to the truths of the unconscious.

But there is another way to think about impersonality - or maybe even to do impersonal art. And while I’m sure there is precedent for this sort of idea (commenters?) - a few things I’ve been seeing around the internet and on tv have got me thinking in a different direction.

The first is this tv commercial:

It’s fairly difficult to discern what exactly this ad is meant to sell. The Dassault website is only somewhat helpful…

Sophisticated technologies tend to be the preserve of experts. Today, Dassault Systèmes wants to break with this tradition and establish 3D technology as a new universal language with applications in every walk of life. But that’s not all. At Dassault Systèmes, we also strongly believe that the more advanced and complex technology becomes, the easier it should be to use.

To express this groundbreaking vision – and the major advances we have driven in 3D technology in terms of capability, flexibility and ease of use – French advertising agency devarrieuxvillaret has created a new tagline for Dassault Systèmes:

See What You Mean.

OK… “Universal language,” eh? (Of course, Dassault is best known for making warplanes…. and for owning Le Figaro…)

At any rate, the ad is a mashup of SimCity (the bit where the building flashes red because it’s not connected up to the underground utility conduits is the deadest giveaway) and letraset type peopleoids (not sure if that’s the appropriate term for the little guys pictured below or not…)

That’s all well and good. It’s likely the sort of ad that presents a image of something not yet possible, but which, by triggering a mass-fantasy, will urge that impossible thing into existence… Not unlike the fancy computer interface in Minority Report….

But what interests me in particular about this ad is the way that it proposes a new form of fiction, not yet possible, but dreamed of, perhaps, for at least the last 150 years. (The Joyce quote is, of course, only a plagiarized version of a few passages from Flaubert’s letters). What would it be like to use a technology like the one shown in the commercial as a technology for the creation of fiction? A fiction in which the “characters” were left to roam “on their own” a preconstructed section of “reality” forged by the artist, following the imperatives wired into their advanced AI? The little people stuck in the traffic jam in the ad, the pedestrians yelling at the cars - what would it be like if we could follow them closely, “hear” what they are thinking, establish ever more complex situations to drop them into? Fiction as experiment in a sense truer than any that has ever before been attempted. Fiction, at last, opened to the contingency and unpredictability that it has crept towards, largely unsuccessfullly, during the entirely of the period that we label the “modern.”

I am not talking about machinima, not the way it is practiced now, anyway. I am not talking about “user-controlled” “characters”….

Anyway, so that’s the first trigger. Second is this, which handles things a bit differently.

“Anthroptic” is an edition of 80 hand-made artist books that represents the collaboration between new media artist Ethan Ham and writer Benjamin Rosenbaum. The book contains 8 folios that pair one image with one “chapter” of the story. The images were taken from Ethan’s online project “Self-Portraits” in which he trained a facial recognition program to his face before unleashing it onto the internet photo service Flickr. While searching the millions of photos on Flickr for its creator, the computer program sometimes made mistakes, identifying inanimate objects as Ethan. These mistake images became the starting point for Benjamin’s short short story. Benjamin weaves these images into an exquisitely interconnected tale that can be read in any order.

Scripted recognitions, epiphanies. Algorithmic revelations. That sort of thing. Robotic portraiture. You start to see where I am going here with this…

The final example came through today, via we make money not art.

(re)collector is a public art installation that approaches Cambridge as a ‘museum of the mind’, using cameras to acquire memorable images that can then be reorganised into ideas. The Greek concept of ut pictura poesis claims that poetry is more ‘imageful’ than prose. In this project, the cameras do not document Cambridge using a simple, straightforward archive of events, but rather seek to record a collection of dramatic moments. The city becomes a tableau for pictura poesis, with events amplified through combinations of framing, movement, and silence, becoming more memorable and cohesive as a result.

This interesting enough at this point, the idea of constructing “ideas” or narratives out of CCTV footage. But where things get truly fascinating comes in the next paragraph:

The gothic character of the Bridge of Sighs, King’s College Chapel and various city centre side streets present backdrops for extracting cinematic moments from peoples’ everyday activities. Surveillance cameras installed around the city, will be programmed to recognise and capture public activities including farewell scenes, meetings, escape scenes, chases, love scenes, etc. Each day over the festival, the results will be edited to produce a daily feature film, complete with premise, protagonists, locations, plot, to be viewed at a public screening in Cambridge during the festival programme. The movie’s audience is composed of many of the same people that feature in it; the project seeks to renegotiate our relationship with where we live by showing us the latent narratives embedded in our everyday lives that we cannot see.

I’d love to know exactly how the cameras are programmed to decide what a moment of fictional significance, of narrative crisis, looks like. (I certainly don’t doubt that it can be done as it is already being done). And what if instead of humans getting involved with the editing of the clips into a coherent narrative, the machine performed that task as well. Surely, the recognition of a “love scene” is more complicated than sticking the scenes together in some sort of coherent order.

I’m going to have to write a follow-up post, unfortunately, detailing the aesthetic and political ramifications I think might come of such endeavors when focused properly, as I’m too beat to continue tonight. A few of the words and phrases, though, that are hovering about in my mind include “fiction as experiment,” “(repurposed) automatic behavioral detection,” “automation for automation’s sake,” “interchangeable parts,” “autonomy vs. advertisement” and…. “(truly) socialist realism.”

More soon… Sorry to defer the punchline…

(NB: I should say that I do know that some parallel work is being done on this sort of thing by the media/body people, by, for instance. But it nevertheless seems to me that I am aiming in a slightly to very different direction than much of that very helpful work…)

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