v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Narcossism

Interview with Avital Ronell regarding her 1994 book Crack Wars:

AL

Could you talk about the structure of Crack Wars. Partly it's about addictions, Madame Bovary, Heidegger's work. There are divisions in it and I'm interested in the non-linear aspects of its structure.

AR

I could track down some register and show its cohesiveness. My purpose was not to show much complicity with the metaphysics of continuity. In fact, I wanted to move with a disruptive flow chracteristic of the types of experience which we can still have which are discontinuous, rhythmed according to different moments and impulses, urges. I was trying to play precisely with the question of speeding and slowing down, and the relation of artificial injections to the way we can think about temporality. So the book is on different types of drugs, too: there's the more psychedelic moments, there's the narcotized moments where it slows down into a heroin experience, and there's the speed freak moments. Different articulations. There's different angles and approaches (or reproaches) to the problem. Since it's also trying to argue for the relationship of drugs to technology, I do try to sequence it according to this discontinuous flow, in the sense that the electronic media "makes sense" only by discontinuous flows. So it would be an instance of non-technological resistance to try to produce an uninterrupted linear argumentation. It's really timed and segmented according to the types of technologies that I link with drugs.

It would have been very odd to present something so discontinuous in a continuous, even in an archaic and traditional way. I thought that the object of inquiry posited some laws about how the book had to be written. According to different types of experience of reading that were simulated. In the beginning, there are "hits." So, in a sense, I try to addict the reader. I try to control the dosage. One of my arguments, which I hope the material aspect of the book performs, is that we're also addicted to reading. If culture implies some notion of addictive investment, then what do we hold against the addict? Anything can function as drug--music, TV, love. When does the law step in, and according to what discourse? How do we distinguish between good and bad addictions?

AL

You coined this word: Narcossism. Can you elaborate on this concept?

AR

I wanted to suggest that narcissism has been recircuited through a relation to drugs. Narcossism is supposed to indicate the way that our relation to ourselves has now been structured, mediated, that is, by some form of addiction and urge. Which is to say, that to get off any drug, or anything which has been invested as an ideal object -- something that you want to incorporate as part of you -- precipitates a major narcissistic crisis. Basically I wanted to suggest that we need to study the way the self is pumped up or depleted by a chemical prosthesis.

AL

It seems that addictions are the sine qua non of human ontology. It would be interesting to hear you describe a subject without addictions.

AR

Since I link it to the death drive and beyond the pleasure principle, the Freudian readings of pleasure that are never pure, they aren't necessarily on the side of wholesomeness and health. I try to say how that's a myth and a mystification: the virginal pure body that would be non-addicted, absolutely outside of addiction. That's why I include bodybuilding, vitamins, technology. I think that the structure of addiction is fundamental. That isn't to say that it can't be negotiated, managed, or somehow brought into a rapport of its own liberating possibility. I want to suggest that there are no drug free zones. Now, it could be that there are good and bad addictions. I don't see how one can write, or be an artist, or think without some installation of the addictive structure.

AL

Do you think that pleasure leads one towards the death instinct? Or are there two types of pleasure?

AR

The double nature of pleasure is something that I wanted to trace out. For pleasure to be what it is, it has to exceed a limit of what is altogether wholesome and healthy. Our idioms reflect this: when we like something we tend to say we were "blown away" or "It killed me," and other deadly utterances. To the extent that pleasure is something that one seeks, it also has to make us confront the limits of our being. Otherwise it's something like contentedness, which can be shown to be in fact an abandonment of pleasure. In our Constitution, we're invited to pursue "happiness" not "pleasure."

I'm interested in a certain kind of honesty about thinking what constitutes pleasure or human desire. That includes our nuclear desire. We must wish to get blown away. If we practiced Nietzschean indecency.... Nietzsche said you have to be rigorously indecent, and really think about those desires. Once desire is on the line, there's going to be destruction and a turning around of values. What I called in Crack Wars "a destructive jouissance."

More

The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions

from Information is beautiful

A conversation between Louis Doulas and Jaakko Pallasvuo

From Louis Doulas site:

LD: Your identity/brand is split between multiple internet presences. There is definite cohesion between the works on your artist website and your Tumblr, but your illustrations seem severed and separate. Google image searching you, your comics and illustrations actually appear more frequently than your other work. In Auditions you briefly meditate on identity association and representation on the internet and I’m curious as to how you intentionally shape this identity. How do you approach self-design?

JP: The way I think is fairly contradictory so it makes sense that the works would emerge that way as well. I question how satisfying maintaining a strict, programmed artistic identity would be in the long run. Making art is for me very much a form of learning. I will gladly sacrifice cohesion if it means that I can explore larger fields of knowledge.

I’ve been uploading works to various internet contexts since I was 16 and can accept that I cannot control their circulation. I do contemplate the way I represent / have represented myself online but I can’t completely dictate my “brand” anymore. I appreciate artists who are able to maintain a cohesive image, but I don’t think I could be / would want to be one.

LD: A lot of your image work utilizes 80′s and 90’s aesthetic and culture as a jumping off point. From the midi backing tracks heard in your How To video series, to the gradients, colors and photoshop brushwork found on www.dawsonscreek.info, where do you place nostalgia, irony and sincerity throughout these works? Where do these begin and end for you?

JP: Irony and nostalgia are difficult terms. I think of irony as snarky non-commitment and nostalgia as uncritical sentimentality. It feels unsafe to connect them to my own work. I have an interest in the recent past and have made attempts towards charting what I assume are generational experiences. I am genuinely fascinated by Tumblr culture, Dawson’s Creek as well; choosing the URL was not merely an ironic gesture to me. It’s easy to understand how people would perceive my work that way (as ironic), but my approach is quite serious and sombre. I guess it adds to the confusion that I do want to investigate nostalgia, irony and sincerity as themes. It’s a fine line between making works about irony and making works that are ironic. I’m treading that line.

LD: Previously, we’ve spoken about the influence of cinema in many of your video works. Your interest in a type of ‘cinema of the internet’ or the idea that many of your works are informed by cinema while also attempting to address their circulation as documentation on the internet, while becoming documentation in and of themselves. Could you talk more about this?

JP: I appreciate how sites like Youtube assign the same context to all video material. There’s something cruel and reductive about it, but it also makes obscure things accessible. I feel like the divide between short-form cinema and video art is often artificial and maybe the internet can help erase that divide. I have an ongoing interest in the idea of ethnographic/anthropological cinema and the methods of essay film. I have made videos that explore those interests. There is a fair amount of meta-commentary going on, the videos discussing their own failures. It’s the curse of self-awareness. I don’t really see my work as documentary, although I do understand how that connection could be made. The videos definitely have to do with awkwardly imposing dramatic structures onto reality, the relative impossibility of that.

It’s a tired observation that the Internet diffuses the divide between high and low culture, but I feel like I have to point that out because it’s central to my interest in the medium. I’ve recently been enjoying this SinäTuubaPaska (the Finnish equivalent of Youtube Poop) channel more than most institutionally verified art. The videos are edited in such a brilliant, hypnotic, varied way, it reminds me of Jazz. I also like how the Finnish dubbing of mainly American source material localizes and complicates the videos, how it ties them to 90′s childhoods. The videos deal with the unreliability of videos (I was trying to write “the unreliability of memory” before I got distracted).

I also like when this is reversed, an artwork that transcends art and becomes a meme. I think the best thing about the How To videos was how much attention especially the Internet Art related episode got from sort of random sources. I enjoyed reading the comments on Knowyourmeme.com (pro tip: don’t bother making a video if you’re gonna post a half-assed slideshow made in windows movie maker). It was reassuring to understand that I am somehow able to imitate the mechanics of meme content, and fun to receive feedback on the video as both art and content nugget, even if the feedback was mostly negative and related to the failure of the videos to be any of the things they alluded to being (art, critique or lulz).

LD: Low Epic and Screen Test discursively reflect on the social and cultural placement of the self within a networked age. These videos become personal and highly self-conscious yet you never really reveal yourself. There is always someone else narrating, posing for the camera, etc. Why choose to use an alternate identity?

JP: It’s about obscuring and obstructing, about freeing myself from the constraints of gender and national identity and about variation.

Art after Social Media

Banning "Amateur" Ads

From Visual Culture Blog:

American Apparel quite openly plays with this notion of the amateur since the subject in the photographs is an amateur model as opposed to a professional model. The ads themselves seek to support this narrative by including text such as ‘Meet Steffi’. Notably, unlike the Campbells, Schiffers, or Evangelistas of the past, ‘Steffi’ has no last name, further signifying her status as amateur plucked from a crowd of ‘everyday people’. The bland and seemingly ill-considered location, the unmade bed (perhaps in a hotel room), even the cables from a bedside lamp all contribute to the perception that the images are amateurish. Lastly, the way the photographs were taken – namely with a direct flash light perhaps mounted on a point and shoot camera and seemingly accidental framing – further signify the amateurishness in the image. ASA’s assessment that the images appear exploitative and voyeuristic is provoked by the patriarchal vantage point of the photograph – the male photographer pointing down the camera and thus dominating over the female subject. Here, the downward gaze functions as a metaphor for sexual domination. Looking at all these variables in the photograph, I would argue that rather than the subject signifying the ‘amateurish’, it is the way that the photographs were taken that contribute to this perception the most. In other words, it is not primarily the subjects in the American Apparel ads that are amateurish, but the photographs.

Establishing this important distinction between amateurish subjects and amateurish photographs helps to understand why specifically these American Apparel ads were banned by the ASA. Take for example the recent shoe campaign by the British pop singer Cheryl Cole. Similar to the American Apparel ads, the position of Cole’s exposed legs, the hands in between her legs, and her gaze back to the camera are all sexually suggestive. Yet the fact that Cole’s campaign was not banned (and I am sure that there are many similar campaigns that also have not been banned) relates less to the gesture, position or the state of undress of the subject, than it relates to the setting, format and technique of the photograph. Unlike the American Apparel ads, the shoe campaign was photographed in a studio, under controlled lighting with professional grade equipment. For the lack of a better term, it’s a professional photograph.

As a consequence of this logic, it must be deduced that professional looking photographs – no matter how exploitative, voyeuristic or sexually suggestive they may be – are less likely banned. The assumed professionalism and perfection of commercial photography thus appears to legitimise the sexualisation of women (as well as men). The more perfect (and therefore less real) the photograph, the more sexual the context of the photograph can be.

Yet there is, I believe, another reason why Cheryl Cole’s ad is unlikely going to raise eyebrows with the ASA and the majority of the public. As the shoes make up a central part of the image, the photograph clearly reads as an ad for shoes (if not fashion as a whole). So in addition to professional-looking and therefore non-amateur photography, images with a clearly decipherable commercial agenda appear to be more legitimate. This clarity about the commercial intent of the brand is completely absent in the American Apparel ad: although the viewer knows it’s an ad for clothing, the photograph could easily be a snapshot in a private photo album or a men’s magazine. The ambiguity of what exactly the photograph seeks to promote thus filters into a number of other ambiguities apparent in the photographs: the ambiguous age of the young woman, the ambiguous reference to a sexual act as signified by the unmade bed and the ambiguous presence of a potentially exploitative and voyeuristic Other (e.g. the photographer himself). Paraphrasing the unlikely source Donald Rumsfeld, it’s these known unknowns that most likely triggered the banning of these ads.

Joachim Schmid

From Joachim Schmid's web site:

I am pleased to announce that my thirty-year project Bilder von der Straße (Pictures from the Street) was completed recently. I decided to discontinue the work after one thousand findings. The project began in August 1982 and ended in March 2012. During this time I picked up one thousand lost or abandoned photographs from the world’s pavements. The complete work is now available in book form.
Although the collection has been exhibited widely, this is the first time it is printed as a complete set. Published in four volumes, the books present every found photograph or its fragments in their original size and in the chronological order they were discovered. No artistic intervention has taken place except for the inclusion of the date and location where each picture was found. As well as providing a record of my travels, the books document people’s use and abuse of photographs, with almost all the photographs in the collection depicting people and more than half of these being ripped or defaced in some way.
The books are available either through my shop or directly from Lulu.

An Economy Strategy change

Robert Reich at The Guardian:

Europe's forced austerity is pushing the continent into recession. Spain is already in one, and much of the rest of Europe is on the way. Luckily, the United States hasn't yet fallen into the austerity trap – America's fiscal policy is still wisely expansionary – but it's not sufficient to overcome a pull-back by American consumers.

Because most Americans' real pay continues to drop, they're going deeper into debt and tapping into their savings. Inevitably, they'll have to cut their spending. Without sufficient government spending to make up the difference, total demand will shrink, causing employers to pare hiring. March's disappointing jobs report could mark the beginning.

All this puts the odds of a Romney presidency far too high for comfort. So, what is Obama to do?

He'll have to go beyond "we're on the right track" and offer the nation a clear, bold strategy for boosting the economy. Such a strategy would help inoculate him if the US economy slows. It would also provide him with an economic mandate in his second term.

Obama should focus on four items.

First, he should demand that America's big banks modify the mortgages of homeowners still struggling in the wake of Wall Street's housing bubble. He should threaten that if the banks fail to provide meaningful relief to homeowners, in his second term he'll fight to resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate investment from commercial banking. He'll also seek to break up Wall Street's biggest banks – as the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve Bank recently recommended.

Second, he should stop oil speculators from raising gas prices. Numerous studies are showing that speculation by US index-fund traders is pushing up gas prices by almost $1 a gallon. Wall Street and Big Oil are making lots of money, but average Americans are paying the price. Oil-industry lawyers have gone to court to prevent the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from setting limits on such speculation. Obama should push the CFTC to set those limits, and instruct the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute oil-price manipulation.

Third, the president should make it clear he won't allow government spending cuts to take precedence over job creation. He won't follow Europe into an austerity trap of slower growth and higher unemployment. While he understands the need to reduce the nation's long-term budget deficit, he should commit to vetoing any spending cuts until the unemployment rate in the US is down to 5%. Instead, he should commit to further job-creating investments in the nation's crumbling infrastructure – pot-holed roads, unsafe bridges, inadequate pipelines, woefully-strained public transportation, and outmoded ports.

Finally, Obama should make sure Americans understand the link between America's fragile recovery and widening inequality. As long as so much of the nation's disposable income and wealth goes to the top, the vast middle class lacks the purchasing power to fire up the economy. That's why the so-called "Buffett rule" he has proposed – setting a minimum tax rate for millionaires – needs to be seen as just a first step toward ensuring that the gains from growth are more widely shared. He should vow to do more in his second term.

Hype

Vallejo Nocturno 2012- NYNY

From Notes on Hype:

Hype already presumes that no one completely buys into it; the passive dope who just responds to hype with naive enthusiasm is obviously a straw man, the creation of which is hype’s chief achievement. Hype creates this stooge that makes us feel smart in being jaded about hype. Advertising generally works by trying to make audiences feel smart and insecure at the same time; it flatters us but makes us know that the flattery is conditional. Hype says: yeah, you are probably smarter than to fall unreservedly for this obviously overhyped thing, but still you better know about it so you know just why you haven’t fallen for it. As Powers notes, Through our engagement with hype “we are at once too savvy and not savvy enough.”

By definition, hype is never a surprise, an accident. In fact, we know when something has gone “viral” precisely because it hasn’t been hyped in advance; its spread is unexpected. Why something like Rebecca Black’s “Friday” caught on is a legitimate question, the birth of meme-ology. Something like Lena Dunham’s HBO show Girls is another matter. It is not a meme. It can only be understood within the context of its preparatory promotion. As Powers argues, “Hype is a state of anticipation generated through the circulation of promotion, resulting in a crisis of value.” The crisis of value is in part aesthetic — the intensity of hype implies the thing in question can’t stand on its own and can’t attract its own audience.

But it’s also a crisis of what we mean by value. Hype is a switch point where attention comes to seem valuable for its own sake, as the point of all cultural production. A hyped work can only be about its own popularity. Hype reinforces an idea of value that fits well in a world of social-by-design products, suggesting that art is only meaningful to “consume” when you yourself have an audience to watch you consume it. What’s the point in trying to enjoy something no one else is watching? There is no advantage, no value, in that. Powers notes that “consumption is not synonymous with endorsement, but it is increasingly read that way.” I might modify that to: We increasingly know we are consuming something only when it can be registered as an endorsement — when we know it has made some statement about ourselves. Powers writes:

As more of an individual’s relationships, transactions, beliefs, and self-concepts take place in, or are primed for, public consumption, and as the economy continues to shift toward entrepreneurialism and self-employment while technological advancements shift toward mobile, social media, each of us is likewise pulled into these promotional tropes.

That is, given the imperative to be productive on social media, hype is as much a model for personal conduct as it is promotion for a particular good. It teaches us to be careful in how we promote ourselves through the things we choose to attach ourselves — to stoke and undercut expectations about ourselves simultaneously. Since self-promotion is a given, not a choice, we should aspire to do it right. Hype is compelling because it starkly models how to do it wrong and how to do it well, and persuades us we’ll always know the difference, even when they are the same thing.

Shredded Social Contract

From The Guardian:

In Cartagena, Molina successfully launched this dialogue, with leaders of the Organisation of American States agreeing to carry out a technical study on current drug policy that will be used to recommend alternatives. But it wasn't just those in favour of policy alternatives doing the talking; president Obama and Canada's prime minister Harper have also, in their own slow and disingenuous ways, begun to acknowledge reality. Although Obama has been clear that he opposes all forms of decriminalisation and legalisation, he admitted that drug reform was a debatable issue, stating: "I think it is entirely legitimate to have a conversation about whether the laws in place are doing more harm than good in certain places." Perhaps even more telling was Harper, who conceded at a press conference that the drug war was "not working".

What these kernels of reason suggest is that even for ideologues, the topic of reform has become unavoidable and that the political currency of polarisation is officially bankrupt. If we view Cartagena within the framework of a traditional war, what we have witnessed is the first draft of an armistice. The problem with the drug war, and the reason why it has taken so long for reformers to gain any traction, is that it has remained a niche issue due to its deeply classist nature. In a global context, developing nations endure the violence while the developed subsidise it, through both consumer demand and law enforcement funding. Within the developed countries a similar formula is reproduced; with poor neighbourhoods and demographics taking the place of their nation-state equivalents.

The corrosive results of this arrangement are obvious to anyone who has been paying attention. Public funds are diverted away from more worthy projects into the criminal justice system. Police are made to spend their days toiling as bagmen and bullies while other, more morally reprehensible crimes go unnoticed. Entire postal codes lose faith in their governments and many become completely alienated from those same police who are meant to protect them. Throughout the western hemisphere and Europe, the public's view of government has been subject to a lingering decay. The American public's trust in their government has never been lower, the same goes for Mexico, and last year's riots in England demonstrated exactly what happens when a nation operates on a shredded social contract.

Food as an Obstacle

Interview with Harvey Levenstein from The Coffin Factory:

The Coffin Factory:  Fear of Food focuses on conceptions of food which you prove to be “groundless or at best unduly exaggerated” by the media, corporations, and our government. Do you see this authoritative manipulation as a trend in America that extends beyond the food industry?

Harvey Levenstein: To see that, sadly, this is indeed the case, you don’t have to look any further than Paul Krugman’s columns in the New York Times, which regularly show how the ridiculous ideas propounded by the media, corporations, and all-too-many politicians and are not only taken seriously, but often become the basis of government policy.

The Coffin Factory:  Has your research for this book affected the way you eat, and the way your family eats? For example, have the discoveries of “pink slime” deterred you from trips to McDonalds with your grandchildren, or have you stopped eating American meat after learning that the sloppy practices on the kill floor facilitate fatal bacteria like E. coli.?

Harvey Levenstein:  When I wrote about “pink slime” (before it was labelled that) in my book, I remarked on how unappetizing it looked. I also wrote about hot dogs, whose slimy, gray, extruded ingredients look even worse. However, since neither of these pose a health risk, I rarely allow myself to think of this. Indeed, I enjoy a good hot dog (particularly in Pittsburgh and Chicago, and I still eat hamburgers when I travel in the States (“pink slime” is not allowed here in Canada.) E Coli. is, of course, a much more serious threat, and although I also enjoy a good hamburger (including, occasionally, a not-so-good one at McDonalds) I no longer buy ground beef, or any other meat, in supermarkets. I am lucky enough to have a reputable local butcher whose meat comes from identifiable farms and is not processed in the huge “finishing” and slaughtering operations where the problem originates. As for my grandchildren, not to put too fine a point on it: my daughter would kill me if I ever took them to McDonalds.

The Coffin Factory:  Advocates for the Pharmaceutical industry have argued that the rise of obesity in America is a new “disease,” which they are hoping to cure with a pill. There are other arguments that obesity is a result of irresponsible parenting, or lack of self awareness, or the processing of food (particularly corn), or the privatizing of government responsibility. What do you think is the major cause of obesity in America?

Harvey Levenstein:  One thing I find interesting about the obesity scare is how it parallels our reaction to hearing that someone has contracted a serious illness. It is hard not to blame it on their doing something that we don’t do—smoking, of course, being the best example. So, exercise enthusiasts blame obesity on lack of exercise, habitual dieters blame it on overeating, leftists blame the giant food processors, right-wingers blame the lack of self-control of the poor, and so on. My wife, who is fiercely anti-smoking, likes to point out that Americans’ weight rose at the same time that smoking decreased, something that I, as an ex-smoker who put on the 8 pounds after quitting, cannot readily dismiss. Obviously, there is no single major “cause.” One must also be suspicious of those who have exaggerated the extent of the “disease.” As with the heart disease “epidemic,” those with a stake in scaring us about it lowered the BMI for “overweight” so that it would include all kinds of people (such as me) whose weight would seem to pose no health risk at all. Yet, in order to gain support for whatever solution they are pushing, they normally confound us with the minority who are truly scarily-obese to conclude that a huge percentage of Americans are “overweight or obese.”

More