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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image autonomy

Walter Ben Michaels on photography as art:

I think it’s only in its claim to be art that photography is crucially important. Of course, there are lots of wonderful photographs, made to convey information, or to sell things, and many of them are very beautiful. But it’s the attempt to make art with photography that seems to me theoretically central and politically important. The theoretical interest is the one I’ve described; precisely because the photograph need not be art and because it need not be (and in crucial ways isn’t) even a representation, it has become the site of the most powerful thinking about what representation is, about what it means to make art and about what art is. And at the center of this is the assertion of the intentionality of the photographer.

Which is also, I think, the political interest of photography. If we think of postmodernism as the cultural expression of neoliberalism, it’s not hard to see that the photograph – understood as necessarily meaning different things to different people – embodies both the commitment to the commodity that’s at the heart of neoliberalism and the commitment to the subject position that’s at the heart of neoliberal models of social justice.

Things that are made to sell are made for – determined by – the buyer; they’re made for the market. And because social justice in the market consists of equality of access to it, anti-discrimination is central to neoliberal justice. Your race or sex or sexuality should not limit your access to the labor market. Hence neoliberal societies are increasingly alert to the ways in which we see each other and seek to prohibit what Rancière calls “hierarchies of vision” – racism, sexism, heterosexism. But they’re not much worried about the hierarchies that have nothing to do with vision – the hierarchies produced not by inequality of access to markets but by the markets themselves. That’s why our efforts to make society more equal with respect to race and sex have happily coexisted with greater inequalities of class.

And the inequality of class, of course, is not dependent on how people see us. So the difference I outlined above between two ways of thinking about the photograph – its meaning determined by the way the beholder sees it or its meaning determined by the intentionality of its maker, regardless of how the beholder sees it – is paralleled by two models of inequality. The inequalities of discrimination are determined by how we see each other; the inequalities of exploitation are not.

What this means is that the photograph’s claim to autonomy, its claim to be something other than a commodity, has a kind of political value. It’s not that you don’t want the work to sell – you can’t live if you can’t sell. It’s that the price may be determined by the buyers but the meaning isn’t determined by the beholders.

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.

Interview with Joseph Steiglitz

From The European:

The European: Four years after the beginning of the financial crisis, are you encouraged by the ways in which economists have tried to make sense of it, and by the ways in which those insights have been taken up by policy makers?
Stiglitz: Let me break this down in a slightly different way. Academic economists played a big role in causing the crisis. Their models were overly simplified, distorted, and left out the most important aspects. Those faulty models then encouraged policy-makers to believe that the markets would solve all the problems. Before the crisis, if I had been a narrow-minded economist, I would have been very pleased to see that academics had a big impact on policy. But unfortunately that was bad for the world. After the crisis, you would have hoped that the academic profession had changed and that policy-making had changed with it and would become more skeptical and cautious. You would have expected that after all the wrong predictions of the past, politics would have demanded from academics a rethinking of their theories. I am broadly disappointed on all accounts.

The European: Economists have seen the flaws of their models but have not worked to discard or improve them?
Stiglitz: Within academia, those who believed in free markets before the crisis still do so today. A few people have shifted, and I want to give credit to them for saying: “We were wrong. We underestimated this or that aspect of our models.” But for the most part, the response was different. Believers in the free market have not revised their beliefs.

The European: So let’s take a longer view. Do you think that the crisis will have an effect on future generations of economists and policy-makers, for example by changing the way that economic basics are taught?
Stiglitz: I think that change is really occurring with the young people. My young students overwhelmingly don’t understand how people could have believed in the old models. That is good. But on the other hand, many of them say that if you want to be an economist, you still have to deal with all the old guys who believe in their wrong theories, who teach those theories, and expect you to believe in them as well. So they choose not to go into those branches of economics. But where I have been even more disappointed is American policy-making. Ben Bernanke gives a speech and says something like, there was nothing wrong with economic theory, the problems were a few details in implementation. In fact, there was a lot wrong with economic theory and with the basic policy framework that was derived from theory. If your mindset is that nothing was wrong, you will not demand new models. That’s a big disappointment. . . .

The European: And it does not mean that economic growth satisfied the criteria of social fairness.
Stiglitz: Yes, so there is one other thing we have to take into account: What is happening to most citizens in a country? When you look at America, you have to concede that we have failed. Most Americans today are worse off than they were fifteen years ago. A full-time worker in the US is worse off today than he or she was 44 years ago. That is astounding – half a century of stagnation. The economic system is not delivering. It does not matter whether a few people at the top benefitted tremendously – when the majority of citizens are not better off, the economic system is not working. We also have to ask of the German system whether it has been delivering. I haven’t studied all the data, but my impression is no.

The European: What do you say to someone who argues thus: Demographic change and the end of the industrial age have made the welfare state financially unsustainable. We cannot expect to cut down on our debt without fundamentally reducing welfare costs in the long run.
Stiglitz: That is absurd. The question of social protection does not have to do with the structure of production. It has to do with social cohesion or solidarity. That is why I am also very critical of Draghi’s argument at the European Central Bank that social protection has to be undone. There are no grounds upon which to base that argument. The countries that are doing very well in Europe are the Scandinavian countries. Denmark is different from Sweden, Sweden is different from Norway – but they all have strong social protection and they are all growing. The argument that the response to the current crisis has to be a lessening of social protection is really an argument by the 1% to say: “We have to grab a bigger share of the pie.” But if the majority of people don’t benefit from the economic pie, the system is a failure. I don’t want to talk about GDP anymore, I want to talk about what is happening to most citizens.

The European: Has the political Left been able to articulate that criticism?
Stiglitz: Paul Krugman has been very strong on articulating criticism of the austerity arguments. The broader attack has been made, but I am not sure whether it has been fully heard. The critical question right now is how we grade economic systems. It hasn’t been fully articulated yet but I think we will win this one. Even the Right is beginning to agree that GDP is not a good measure of economic progress. The notion of the welfare of most citizens is almost a no-brainer.

The European: It seems to me that much of the discussion is still about statistical measurements – if we’re not measuring GDP, we’re measuring something else, like happiness or income differences. But is there an element to these discussions that cannot be put in numerical terms – something about the values we implicitly bake into our economic system?
Stiglitz: In the long run, we ought to have those ethical discussions. But I am beginning from a much narrower base. We know that income doesn’t reflect many things we care about. But even with an imperfect indicator such as income, we should care about what happens to most citizens. It’s nice that Bill Gates is doing well. But if all the money went to Bill Gates, the system could not be graded as successful.

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The Projective City

Vallejo Nocturno 2012- the city

From The New Inquiry:

To forestall critiques, neoliberalism needs a new justification. Boltanski and Chiapello call this “the projective city” — an ideology for a “connexionist world” that they extrapolate from 1990s management literature. By its lights, society’s organizational basis is the project: any sort of temporary but focused group task. Not limited to the traditional workplace, projects extend through everyday life, representing for workers the means to both economic opportunity and personal fulfillment.

In the projective city, “the extension of the network is life itself.” To extend networks, one must evince activity — the projective city’s basis of value (as opposed to, say, Marxist “socially necessary labor time.”) Activity comprises whatever someone can think to do that others will pay attention to or get involved in. The more “activity” one can claim responsibility for, the more connected one becomes and the more projects one can line up. Since literally anything one does can become “activity,” self-fashioning becomes inseparable from professional development. Employers must evaluate people not in terms of specific skills but their total social package.

This emphasis on social interaction is meant to put a positive spin on the eroding distinction between work and nonwork, the personal and professional. That an employee’s duties necessarily exceed any job description and must encompass their whole personality is presented as a good thing: one can be what one does. “Connexionist human beings are owners of themselves,” the authors note, suggesting such reification can be represented as fulfillment, engagement. Invest in the start-up of you!

Nu Esthetics

On the "new aesthetic", from Bruce Sterling:

The “New Aesthetic” is a native product of modern network culture. It’s from London, but it was born digital, on the Internet. The New Aesthetic is a “theory object” and a “shareable concept.”

The New Aesthetic is “collectively intelligent.” It’s diffuse, crowdsourcey, and made of many small pieces loosely joined. It is rhizomatic, as the people at Rhizome would likely tell you. It’s open-sourced, and triumph-of-amateurs. It’s like its logo, a bright cluster of balloons tied to some huge, dark and lethal weight.

There are some good aspects to this modern situation, and there are some not so good ones.

Art movements used to be Left Bank café tables where disaffected creatives quarreled about headlines in newspapers. “Theory objects” from the Internet are squamous, crabgrass-like entities, where people huddle around swollen, unstable databases. We know more or less how analog art movements once behaved. We don’t yet know much at all about collectively-intelligent theory-object “shareable concepts,” whether they’re worth anything or can deliver anything. Maybe they will brilliantly synergize. Maybe they will ignobly crash. Maybe they’ll have the mayfly lifespans of their hardware support. Maybe they will become things even harder to describe than they are now.

First, some “good” aspects of the New Aesthetic.

Above all, the New Aesthetic is telling the truth. There truly are many forms of imagery nowadays that are modern, and unique to this period. We’re surrounded by systems, devices and machineries generating heaps of raw graphic novelty. We built them, we programmed them, we set them loose for a variety of motives, but they do some unexpected and provocative things.

Bridle’s collection of this material is huge. The evidence is impossible to refute. Anybody with a spark of perception who looks through this thing:

http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/

must recognize that modern reality is on display there. What we think about that, or do about that, is another matter. That it exists is not in question.

Look at those images objectively. Scarcely one of the real things in there would have made any sense to anyone in 1982, or even in 1992. People of those times would not have known what they were seeing with those New Aesthetic images. It’s the news, and it’s the truth.

Next, the New Aesthetic is culturally agnostic. Most anybody with a net connection ought to be able to see the New Aesthetic transpiring in real time. It is British in origin (more specifically, it’s part and parcel of a region of London seething with creative atelier “tech houses”). However, it exists wherever there is satellite surveillance, locative mapping, smartphone photos, wifi coverage and Photoshop.

The New Aesthetic is comprehensible. It’s easier to perceive than, for instance, the “surrealism” of a fur-covered teacup. Your Mom could get it. It’s funny. It’s pop. It’s transgressive and punk. Parts of it are cute.

It’s also deep. If you want to get into arcane matters such as interaction design, computational aesthetics, covert surveillance, military tech, there’s a lot of room for that activity in the New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic carries a severe, involved air of Pynchonian erudition.

It’s contemporary. It’s temporal rather than atemporal. Atemporality is all about cerebral, postulated, time-refuting design-fictions. Atemporality is for Zenlike gray-eminence historian-futurist types. The New Aesthetic is very hands-on, immediate, grainy and evidence-based. Its core is a catalogue of visible glitches in the here-and-now, for the here and for the now.

It requires close attention. If you want to engage with the New Aesthetic, then you must become involved with some contemporary, fast-moving technical phenomena. The New Aesthetic is inherently modish because it is ferociously attached to modish, passing objects and services that have short shelf-lives. There is no steampunk New Aesthetic and no remote-future New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic has no hyphen-post, hyphen-neo or hyphen-retro. They don’t go there, because that’s not what they want.

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Marshal Mcluhan Interview

The Narcotic Effects of Media

From David Bobbitt's  essay on teaching Mcluhan's Undesratnding Media:

The chance to snap out of our numbness, provided by processes of break boundaries or hybridization, is one of several possible antidotes to the narcotic effects of media. McLuhan wrote Understanding Media, in part, as a warning about the effects of media that we are ignoring. One of McLuhan’s antidotes is awareness; by being aware of the effects our media have on us we can be in a better position to counteract them. But that is only the first step. Awareness itself is not enough. McLuhan writes in chapter 31 on television:

It is the theme of this book that not even the most lucid understanding of the peculiar force of a medium can head off the ordinary "closure" of the senses that causes us to conform to the pattern of experience presented. . . . To resist TV, therefore one must acquire the antidote of related media like print. (329)

So one antidote to the numbing effect of a particular medium is to use another medium that has a counter-effect: “When the technology of a time is powerfully thrusting in one direction, wisdom may well call for a countervailing thrust” (70-71). So turn off the TV (or the computer or the cell phone) after some time and read a book or take a walk in the woods. After enough reading, have a conversation with another human being. McLuhan thus is arguing that a “cure” for the effects of a dominant medium or pattern of the time can be a countervailing force in the opposite direction of the dominating force.

Another antidote to technological narcosis is for people to assume the attitude of the artist. McLuhan writes:

The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinion or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception. (18)

He further claims that the “artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs” and so “the artist is indispensible in the shaping and analysis and understanding of the life of forms, and structures, created by electric technology” (65). But by “artist” McLuhan does not mean just the person who formally engages in some artistic endeavor as a profession but the person of “integral awareness,” a point he makes clear when he says: “The artist is the man, in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness” (65). Thus, the artistic perspective serves as an antidote to media narcosis because it allows us to see the big picture and the interrelationship among things, as well as to anticipate technological changes, and their social and cultural implications, before they happen.

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How do we live together in couples?

From Michael Sicinski's essay on Kiarostami's "Certified Copy":

At the start of this essay, I said that certain parts of Certified Copy could be explained rather directly, even as their function—the “emotional vapor,” I wrote, rather grandiloquently, as I’ve been a bit self-conscious about my opening sentences lately—was highly evocative and mysterious in impact. There are distinct moments during Kiarostami’s film at which not just the stakes but the meaning, the denotative legibility, of Shimell and Binoche’s characters’ relationship changes. Although you can pinpoint the exact moments when this occurs, this doesn’t make those moments obvious. They’re put across in small, subtle gestures that you probably wouldn’t notice if you weren’t looking for them. This is in contrast, of course, with the rather dramatic tonal shifts and careening conversational volte-faces that mark the conversations between Binoche and Shimell as something peculiar, the very thing that makes Certified Copy what it is. Point being, every meltdown, every wrinkle in time, has a starting point, an almost imperceptible rift.

So, to make it absolutely clear: this is a film about a married couple, and although Kiarostami orchestrates the film in something pretty close to real time, we are not watching a series of linear events. To borrow from David Bordwell, the syuzhet of Certified Copy is not the same as its fabula. In other words, the plotline, the series of events depicted onscreen are not the temporally defined, single-trajectory story of “the marriage of the Millers.” As Bordwell tells us, art films frequently pry plot and story, syuzhet and fabula apart, this being the very aesthetic “work” they perform on their topic of choice. (I mentioned some other films of this ilk above.) Certified Copy, like some of the late Buñuels, doesn’t provide clear internal markers of this divergence. In fact, Kiarostami’s sleight of hand (and I apologize for that language—sounds like a parlor trick, when it’s really far more philosophical) is more radical than Buñuel’s, since the Spanish master would provide 45° pans or doubled performers, odd but unmistakable signposts that reality was shifting. (In this regard, Buñuel’s truest heir is, of course, David Lynch.)

Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen

 Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen: For me, artists are—before everything else—citizens, which means that we are embedded in a social fabric with specific histories. So, to fully understand what an artist does, one needs to understand the social, economical, and cultural forces that shape their subjectivity. I think the role of the artist—regardless of the cultural climate—is to challenge the hegemony in place, and during periods similar to the one we are currently living in, the contributions by artists are of even more importance for offering alternative visions of the world and different ways of living together. So, in this sense, I agree with Nicolas Bourriaud’s definition of the Altermodern artist that its role is to “produce links between signs far away from each other, exploring the past and the present to create original paths.”