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."

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Lessons from Eastern Europe

Interview with Daniel Chirot at Eurozine:

AS: Much of the present social disillusionment in eastern central Europe, and Lithuania in particular, has been caused by the large-scale privatization policies introduced immediately after 1990, which were only partially successful and, in many cases, socially unjust. As we know, privatization was strongly backed by the western powers and international organizations such as the IMF and World Bank. Indeed, the first two decades of post-communism coincided with the world-wide reign of neoliberalism both in international politics and the economy, even though there had been cautious voices against total privatization (such as John Kenneth Galbraith or communitarian thinker Amitai Etzioni). These days, when neoliberalism seems to be losing its ground, can any lessons be extracted for eastern Europe?

DC: I agree that the prescriptions of the so-called "Washington Consensus" of the 1990s, in other words the rigid application of neoliberal free market economic policies, have turned out to be foolish. They brought the Great Recession of 2008 that still persists, and adherence to such ideas is probably responsible for much of the misery in southern Europe. It isn't that capitalism can be said not to work, but that free markets cannot by themselves function or hope to support a reasonably fair society without government support. Karl Marx may have been wrong about many things, but he understood the contradictions of capitalism and its propensity to create huge inequalities and periodic crises. What made his predictions fail is that the leading capitalist societies eventually adopted institutions to mitigate these problems. Too many experts, particularly Americans, gave poor advice in the 1990s, not only to eastern central Europe, but to other countries as well, including their own, the United States. We are paying for this now. On the other hand, eastern central Europe is still better off than it was before 1989, even though some sectors of the population are doing poorly. Considering how much of a disaster late communist economies really were, reforms could have turned out to be much worse. I hope that the failure of neoliberalism teaches everyone the right lesson. Capitalism works, but not its most unregulated form. We would do well to go back to the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and abandon once and for all the "Chicago School" economics of Milton Friedman and his even more extreme followers.

AS: You have argued that economic backwardness in eastern Europe has its own peculiar historical roots. Could you summarize these? What are the prospects of eastern Europe overcoming its eternal fate of being "semi-peripheral" to the modern world? More generally, do you subscribe to the world systems theorists' classification of the world into categories of centre, periphery and semi-periphery and forecast different degrees of economic success for these regions?

DC: No, these categories only made sense in the past when a few western powers dominated the world economy and controlled vast empires. The question as to why the region was behind western Europe is the wrong one. Instead, we need to ask what made a small part of the West different. Once the West began to grow economically and to industrialize, the parts of eastern Europe that interacted most with the advanced parts of Europe did not go backward. They became, instead, the most advanced parts of eastern Europe. So the whole theory of peripheralization is wrong. Even today, it is Poland, the Baltic countries, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary and Slovenia that are better off than the Balkans, which were shielded for a longer time from western trade and influence. I understand that intellectuals in eastern and central Europe love feeling sorry for themselves, but on a world scale, these societies are not doing so badly. There is no question that they were more backward in the nineteenth century, and that the twentieth century treated them badly; but World War I, World War II and decades of communist rule have caused more harm than any kind of peripheral or semi-peripheral status. I can understand why Marxists hold on to this notion that it is participation in the world economy that has caused backwardness, but the evidence simply doesn't point to that except for some obviously politically exploited colonial areas in the past.

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Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes 1928-2012 - Paris Review Interview

From Paris Review Interview:

FUENTES

I left my post as ambassador to France on the first of April, 1977, and immediately rented a house on the outskirts of Paris, where I could begin to write again. I had not written a word for two years, being a conscientious diplomat. The house I rented, as it turned out, had belonged to Gustave Doré and it brought back all my yearnings for form and terror. Doré's illustrations for “Little Red Riding Hood,” for example: they're so incredibly erotic! The little girl in bed with the wolf! Those were the signs under which my latest novel, Distant Relations, was born.

INTERVIEWER

Why did you find it impossible to write while you were ambassador?

FUENTES

Diplomacy in a sense is the opposite of writing. You have to disperse yourself so much: the lady who comes in crying because she's had a fight with the secretary; exports and imports; students in trouble; thumbtacks for the embassy. Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that. So I have all this pent-up energy which is flowing out right now. I'm writing a great deal these days. Besides, I have learned how to write. I didn't know how to write before, and I guess I learned by being a bureaucrat. You have so much mental time on your hands when you are a bureaucrat: you have time to think and to learn how to write in your head. When I was a young man I suffered a great deal because I faced the challenge of Mallarmé's blank page every day without knowing exactly what I was going to say. I fought the page, and paid for it with ulcers. I made up for it with sheer vigor, because you have vigor when you are writing in your twenties and thirties. Then later on you have to use your energy wisely. When I look back on it, I think perhaps it was the fact that I was behind an official desk for two years that left my mind free to write within itself, to prepare what I was going to write once I left that post. So now I can write before I sit down to write, I can use the blank page in a way I couldn't before.

INTERVIEWER

Tell us how the process of writing takes place within you.

FUENTES

I am a morning writer; I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty, when I go for a swim. Then I come back, have lunch, and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing. I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down. I always follow a triangular pattern on my walks here in Princeton: I go to Einstein's house on Mercer Street, then down to Thomas Mann's house on Stockton Street, then over to Herman Broch's house on Evelyn Place. After visiting those three places, I return home, and by that time I have mentally written tomorrow's six or seven pages.

INTERVIEWER

You write in longhand?

FUENTES

First I write it out in longhand, and then when I feel I “have” it, I let it rest. Then I correct the manuscript and type it out myself, correcting it until the last moment.

INTERVIEWER

Is the rewriting extensive or is most of the rewriting taken into account during the mental writing?

FUENTES

By the time I get it on paper, it is practically finished: there are no missed sections or scenes. I know basically how things are going and I have it more or less fixed, but at the same time I am sacrificing the element of surprise in myself. Everyone who writes a novel knows he is involved in the Proustian problem of in some way knowing what he is going to write and at the same time being amazed at what is actually coming out. Proust only wrote when he had lived what he was going to write, and yet he had to write as though he knew nothing about it—which is extraordinary. In a way we are all involved in the same adventure: to know what you are going to say, to have control over your material, and at the same time to have that margin of freedom which is discovery, amazement, and a precondition of the freedom of the reader.

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Interview with Wes Anderson

Interview at Dazed Digital with filmaker Wes Anderson:

Dazed & Confused: In the film, Sam asks Suzy what she wants to be when she grows up. As a kid, what did you want to become?
Wes Anderson: I wanted to be an architect. I don’t even know where I got that idea from. I think I was told ‘you should be an architect’ somewhere early on, and I just latched onto it. My idea of being an architect was envisioning variations of what my room could be, split-level secret chambers, transportation in and out, that sort of stuff. I guess that’s why I enjoy getting to build these fantasy locations.

D&C: There are outcasts at the heart of your films. Do you see yourself as one of them?
Wes Anderson: I don’t know. To me an outcast sounds like someone who is completely isolated. I have always had lonely characters in the mix – I don’t think there is much question that most of them are sort of misfits in one way or another. I do see myself that way. I see most people that way. Well, most of the people I know anyway, they feel like misfits, they question whether they belong. Certainly there is a period of time from when you are 12 to... actually, I don’t know if it ever ends, but you start to have these questions like, ‘Do I fit in? Do I need to fit in? Why is this now a question? I didn’t used to have to think about this.’

D&C: Was it hard making a love story about two 12-year-olds feel authentic? Did any of the dialogue come from your own childhood?
Wes Anderson: There is a certain number of lines in every movie that I’ve done where it’s not hard to write, because so and so said it to me 24 years ago and I still remember it. There is one line in this movie where a kid says, ‘Do not cross this stick!’, which came from a time when me and Owen (Wilson) were jogging – which is not something I normally do – many, many years ago, in Texas. This kid came into the middle of the road, and that’s what he said to us: ‘Do not cross this stick.’

D&C: Did you cross it?
Wes Anderson: Yes we did. (laughs)

D&C: What did he do?
Wes Anderson: He recoiled angrily as if he thought we were going to fight him. (laughs)

D&C: Talking of fighting, Sam and Suzy are prone to outbursts of anger. What makes you angry?
Wes Anderson: What makes me angry? So many things. But I tend to be a little more insular. People who know me just know when I’m grouchy. I snarl, and people who know just let it blow over. It doesn’t tend to be a sudden outburst, it tends to be, ‘Forget it; don’t even bother with him for the next few hours.’

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Interview with Owen Kydd

Still from Yucca Color Shift, 2011

From Lay Flat:

Lucas Blalock: Can you talk about the transition in your work from more episodic videos that produce a sort of serialized experience to the very tightly contained loops you have been making recently? I further wanted to ask a sort of goofy question about whether you think of these static, durational, looped pieces as still films or extended photographs?

Owen Kydd: I began by working with a duration of about 30 to 40 seconds per image. I found it was a good length to investigate still/motion, because it seemed enough to provide the manifest of a moment while also giving me the chance to create a montage. I made projects that would slide between a series of 9 or 10 of these images (with ellipses in between). Through this process of looking and editing I began to learn more about making pictures that responded to an extension, and I eventually felt like I could make some singular works.

One thing I found was that durational photographs worked better when they lost the indicators that tied them to a past, and began to confuse the moment of filming with the experience of viewing. Cinema or video works that have a long duration usually quote a recorded or lived time, and even in early pieces like Warhol’s Empire, which is close to losing its temporal markers, one is always made conscious of at least the possibility of an end point. This awareness could also be the tied to the projector’s flicker and the grain, but I also have found this condition in more recent video works. I am interested in trying to locate a more hallucinogenic or endless quality.

In terms of the loop’s designation, I can say that when I think about making a still film, I think about changing a momentum and this feels decisive. But when I think about extending photography it suggests continuing a photograph’s inertia, and this seems more indefinite. My works are technically films because they rely on apparent motion, but the movement is limited within the frame, the effect is minimized, and often the same image is overlapped for many seconds without interruption. This process allows me to consider how a photograph can involve itself in motion.

LB: It is interesting to me that through this ambiguity between the still film and the “durational” photograph you end up bringing into question the boundaries of the device and even the strict usefulness of these categories. I feel that this is akin to the kind of interrogation that has prompted artists of late to return to the darkroom (amongst other strategies), but we are really discussing different limits here altogether.

OK: My pieces are exhibited on backlight screens or monitors. So, as with photography, there is a picture merged with a surface, albeit one that has a CFL light and a refresh rate. I feel that there is still an implicit tension between the screen and the subject. And because I am interested in making a picture of something in the world, I hope this tension presents something like the “possibility of reference” (to borrow Walter Benn Michael’s terms) rather than a fight against it. This is wrapped up in the forced distinction that the flatness of the photograph (and here, the screen) must make between itself and the exterior of the object it depicts, and this is a separation that I’m not sure fully exists in the projected image. I can also say that (with the monitor in mind) I find myself looking for specific surfaces.

Chris Martin

Chris Martin | Bus Maniac, 2008-11, oil and collage on canvas, 54” x 45 1/8

From an interview:

JB: But you know, wishful thinking is the way things start. It kind of seeps into reality after a while.
CM: I wish we could all wish for not know what we are doing. But in a good way. I think there's a sense of freedom that comes from everybody not being too sure what they're doing. Someone once said about New York in the early 1950s, late '40s, after Expressionism was sort of bursting onto the scene: " There was a moment, maybe six weeks or so, when no0 one had any idea how to make a painting." And that's a lovely idea, that we don't know what we're doing. I'm also looking at everyone. I'm looking at all those old African-Americans from the South. And I'm looking at young kids from the undergraduate schools. And I'm looking at Williamsburg. It all seems like these paintings are being made simultaneously and it's kind of interesting. More than kind of interesting, it's really cool.

 

Interview with Darin Mickey

Interview with Darin Mickey at flakphoto.com:

Spaces Corners: You mentioned that you teach a class called "The Political Landscape." When I look at this work I find it to be political in nature. It’s not overt but there are these undertones. They’re a record of time past, of the material that we’re surrounded by every day, what the world is built from and what we’ve done with that material.

Darin Mickey: It’s less in the forefront of my thinking. I think a picture of an empty parking lot can be loaded with political meaning. What you leave out of a picture can speak volumes. A lot of these pictures are of garbage and there’s the obvious concepts of excess and waste, but I want to leave the pictures open enough so people can arrive at those conclusions on their own. I don’t feel the need to photograph a mall on fire or someone being trampled on Black Friday, or a politician with his fingers crossed behind his back to make a political statement in a photograph. I’d like to show something that’s oddly beautiful and ironic. I don’t think irony is bad, because we’re all conflicted and ironic.

Spaces Corners: There’s a real sense of you stopping and looking, not drawing attention so much to you photographing, but to the process of looking. They also seem to be of neglected items that aren’t totally overlooked because there’s an intervention. They feel like you could have just passed by them but at the same time they have a control. That tension in them is what makes them feel strange. Do you come back to these objects to photograph?

Darin Mickey: These can be pretty slow pictures for me to take at times. I’m trying to show something as clearly as I can which is why I might use a flash so things aren’t too obscured by shadows. I’d like to present all the surfaces in the frame somewhat democratically. I try not to have the technique of taking the pictures overshadow the pictures themselves.

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Lucas Foglia Interview

Interview with photographer Lucas Foglia at flakphoto.com:

Daniel Shea: The ambiguity in your work is a narrative strategy that you use well. The work you do for magazines and non-profits involves telling a clear story. Are the photographs you make for them are completely non-ambiguous?

Lucas Foglia: I think all the best pictures have some ambiguity. But they have to be accessible: they have to tell a story and make a viewer want to keep looking at them.

[We trail off for a bit, but then Yale comes up...]

Daniel Shea: Yale is frequently mystified and enlarged by the rest of the art/photo world and prospective MFA students. It’s a thing of its own. And the reality might be different than that. How was your experience in the program?

Lucas Foglia: It’s surprising that it is so frequently mystified… I know that it is statistically hard to get into as a graduate student, but anyone can go to any critique and listen. Before I applied, I visited some critiques, so I knew what I was getting into. Different photographers and curators are invited to the critiques but when I was there Tod Papageorge ran the show. And Tod’s photographic references were consistent: John Szarkowski, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand. Each graduate student showed work every 5 weeks. The panel of critics sat behind a table. The photographs were pinned on the wall, and the graduate student sat in a chair in the middle of the room, facing the panel, with an audience behind him or her. There were some classes each semester, but there were no real obligations besides having to produce work for the critiques.

Daniel Shea: So were you traveling between the critique sessions?

Lucas Foglia: I was traveling a lot. I would extend the school vacations for a week on either end. I drove or flew to photograph and then came back to make up the work and class time. It was a really intense and stressful couple of years.

Daniel Shea: Are you happy you went with that program?

Lucas Foglia: I am. There were times when I was doubtful about it. The critiques were harsh and I was being pushed in ways I wasn’t always comfortable with. But then I realized that even when I was being told to do something, all I had to do was react and make more photographs. I didn’t always agree with the critiques but I had the time and facilities to make new work in response. When artwork gets obliging or defensive in graduate school, it’s a slippery slope. Above all the photographs have to feel personal. What the faculty wanted to see was an effort towards change or experimentation. And if I responded by working my ass off and that showed in the pictures, then it was commended.

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Creeley Interview

Paris Review interview with Robert Creely:

INTERVIEWER

What do you think was the first impulse that set you on the course to being a writer?

ROBERT CREELEY

As a kid I used to be fascinated by people who, like they say, “traveled light.” My father died when I was very young, but there were things of his left in the house that my mother kept as evidences of his life: his bag, for example, his surgical instruments, even his prescription pads. These things were not only relics of his person, but what was interesting to me was that this instrumentation was peculiarly contained in this thing that he could carry in his hand. The doctor's “bag.” One thinks of the idiom that is so current now, “bag,” to be in this or that “bag.” The doctor's bag was an absolutely explicit instance of something you carry with you and work out of. As a kid, growing up without a father, I was always interested in men who came to the house with specific instrumentation of that sort—carpenters, repairmen—and I was fascinated by the idea that you could travel in the world that way with all that you needed in your hands . . . a Johnny Appleseed. All of this comes back to me when I find myself talking to people about writing. The scene is always this: “What a great thing! To be a writer! Words are something you can carry in your head. You can really 'travel light.'”

INTERVIEWER

You speak a great deal about the poet's locale, his place, in your work. Is this a geographic term, or are you thinking of an inner sense of being?

CREELEY

I'm really speaking of my own sense of place. Where “the heart finds rest,” as Robert Duncan would say. I mean that place where one is open, where a sense of defensiveness or insecurity and all the other complexes of response to place can be finally dropped. Where one feels an intimate association with the ground underfoot. Now that's obviously an idealization—or at least to hope for such a place may well be an idealization—but there are some places where one feels the possibility more intensely than others. I, for example, feel much more comfortable in a small town. I've always felt so, I think, because I grew up in one in New England. I like that spill of life all around, like the spring you get in New England with that crazy water, the trickles of water everyplace, the moisture, the shyness, and the particularity of things like blue jays. I like the rhythms of seasons, and I like the rhythms of a kind of relation to ground that's evident in, say, farmers; and I like time's accumulations of persons. I loved aspects of Spain in that way, and I frankly have the same sense of where I now am living in New Mexico. I can look out the window up into hills seven miles from where the Sandia Cave is located, perhaps the oldest evidence of man's occupation of this hemisphere. I think it dates back to either 15,000 or 20,000 BC. and it's still there. And again I'm offered a scale, with mountains to the southeast, the Rio Grande coming through below us to the west, and then that wild range of mesa off to the west. This is a very basic place to live. The dimensions are of such size and of such curious eternity that they embarrass any assumption that man is the totality of all that is significant in life. The area offers a measure of persons that I find very relieving and much more securing to my nature than would be, let's say, the accumulations of men's intentions and exertions in New York City. So locale is both a geographic term and the inner sense of being.

INTERVIEWER

Do you credit any one writer—ancestor or contemporary—with a strong influence on your poetry?

CREELEY

I think Williams gave me the largest example. But equally I can't at all ignore Charles Olson's very insistent influence upon me both in early times and now. And Louis Zukofsky's. The first person who introduced me to writing as a craft, who even spoke of it as a craft, was Ezra Pound. I think it was my twentieth birthday that my brother-in-law took me down to a local bookstore in Cambridge and said, “What would you like? Would you like to get some books?” I bought Make It New and that book was a revelation to me. Pound spoke of writing from the point of view of what writing itself was, not what it was “about.” Not what symbolism or structure had led to, but how a man might address himself to the act of writing. And that was the most moving and deepest understanding I think I have ever gained. So that Pound was very important to my craft, no matter how much I may have subsequently embarrassed him by my own work. So many, many people—Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, Ed Dorn. I could equally say Charlie Parker—in his uses of silence, in his rhythmic structure. His music was influential at one point. So that I can't make a hierarchy of persons.

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