tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74619487476590710922024-03-12T21:46:55.704-07:00An Emphatic UmphThe occasional writings of a would-be JohnsonDaniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.comBlogger704125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-55445900906431708022022-08-09T12:56:00.003-07:002022-08-10T10:50:38.417-07:00The Posture of Things <p>You're shopping for a chair. As you browse the aisles, you note the variety — from backless computer chairs to high bar stools to plush loungers. Some nudge you to sit up straight; some have you poised leaning forward; others have you slunk down and cozy. This is in fact the main criterion for your chair purchase: how does it have you sit? How does it situate you? What posture does it demand of you? </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0oifZwwwxsh-SXXHYoNjGz_y2EhdRGa_Vj33gC_qEGnMqJ9zVInMyVijgopUIVVWaNSFD9Zn3y6ZAWFPk0Rika9xcY3SM97dwuFf7HzND9V8JzJdj4fqJh-ZrJWZQ-ZIOrUoA9z7MbUQfFqOspUhnRw0XBHGFVCjlAm-Fnri2P0mdlZ1o6zZucYat/s822/Screen%20Shot%202022-08-06%20at%202.03.01%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="238" data-original-width="822" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0oifZwwwxsh-SXXHYoNjGz_y2EhdRGa_Vj33gC_qEGnMqJ9zVInMyVijgopUIVVWaNSFD9Zn3y6ZAWFPk0Rika9xcY3SM97dwuFf7HzND9V8JzJdj4fqJh-ZrJWZQ-ZIOrUoA9z7MbUQfFqOspUhnRw0XBHGFVCjlAm-Fnri2P0mdlZ1o6zZucYat/w578-h168/Screen%20Shot%202022-08-06%20at%202.03.01%20PM.png" width="578" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p>So it is with all things — spaces, people, nature art. Everything stands towards us in such and such a way and, in so doing, inflects our posture. Nothing is neutral. Sure, some things stand towards us deadpan. And sometimes we stand towards others without interest or investment. But neither of these are neutral per se: they are the assumption of a posture, a very way of standing towards the world.</p><p>We know this, whether we know it or not, in social settings. Some people ask to be seen more or less ardently. You can hear their voice across the din of a bar; you can see it as they make the rounds, your eye drawn to them like a moon of Jupiter, perhaps despite yourself. But just as the moons of Jupiter are not uniform, each enjoying its own orbit, so it is with the posture of people. Which is to say, posture is not a just a matter of yes or no, visible or invisible, loud or quiet. The posture of things in the world is precisely the infinite variegation of life. We dwell in the nuance of postures, things leaning in and away, all asking for different things. </p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuwKDoVOw_spj0M1wgJJ635sMwoQfHw4_t1wZHfeAtK88VUTKp05Ew1sTG6c7Bk4yOiIgFCX6jicMtZzkbxkveHuFqFd9zstmz34DMrPSUWyOhW4va5CY8G0ya9hn-yfXEj6AQDMtmbhbbKh05aMHYwZXSs66o_uIUh16Pygr0BYrwLSk59HY1s_kd/s800/Big-Mouth_2017_Enamel-on-metal_-95-x-156-copy.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="491" data-original-width="800" height="339" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuwKDoVOw_spj0M1wgJJ635sMwoQfHw4_t1wZHfeAtK88VUTKp05Ew1sTG6c7Bk4yOiIgFCX6jicMtZzkbxkveHuFqFd9zstmz34DMrPSUWyOhW4va5CY8G0ya9hn-yfXEj6AQDMtmbhbbKh05aMHYwZXSs66o_uIUh16Pygr0BYrwLSk59HY1s_kd/w555-h339/Big-Mouth_2017_Enamel-on-metal_-95-x-156-copy.jpeg" width="555" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">"Big Mouth" by Marilyn Minter. Enamel on metal. 8x13'. </span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Look at this painting by Marilyn Minter. Like most people, I assume, I have a strong visceral reaction to this — a guttural gasp. One might be inclined to say,<i> Of course, you want to fuck it.</i> But that's not it at all. The posture of this painting doesn't sit quiet, or even seductive, awaiting penetration. No, this painting is the very act of fucking. My reaction is not one of a subject wanting an object. On the contrary, my reaction is a participation in the sensuality: I am not taking it up, it's taking me up. And yet I'm not being taken per se. I am being taken up in its affect. I may be drawn to it but it's not grabbing me, forcing me, sullying me. Its posture is a frank invitation to its state of always already fucking. </p><p>I think of John Berger's distinction between the naked and the nude. The nude, Berger argues, is almost always a woman who is there to be taken. She is passive, an object for our eyes, desires, and more. The naked, on the other hand, is when the person — almost always a woman — happens to be without clothes. As we take her in with our eyes, she is not passive; she is not there to sate our desires. She is who she is, goes as she goes — she just happens not to have any clothes on:</p><h1 class="quoteText" style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;"><i>"To be naked is to be oneself.<br />To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. ( The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.<br />To be naked is to be without disguise.<br />To be on display is to have the surface of one's own skin, the hairs of one's own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.”</i></h1><div>Art tends to seemingly sit still, an object for our gaze. But as you walk through any museum, you experience a wide range of postures, each piece standing towards you differently and thereby inflecting you this way and that. Rothko turns you inward; Pollock turns you outward; Bacon turns you inside out while Picasso splays you. That's why going to a museum is so exhausting: you've been through the ringer, turned every which way.</div><div><br /></div><div>And yet one's posture is not fixed. It's necessarily circumstantial and therefore relational. How I stand towards you is no doubt different than how I stand towards a woman I fancy, a child, an unknown dog, a Nancy Meyers or Cassevetes film. Each body postures in its way which is inevitably inflected by what it encounters. Think of it this way: a toddler, teen, and old person are all situated differently in a lounge chair as their respective postures encounter the postural demands of the chair. </div><div><br /></div><div>So it is with art, films, or people. It happens all the time: you're at a party (do people still have parties?) with your amor. Someone in the room is loud, their laughter and gutturals ringing out. You are immediately annoyed and do what you can to duck and parry that dominating posture. But your amore, well, they kinda like that posture — and, next thing you know, they're hitting it off across the room. You're dumbfounded — until you remember that posturing is a verb, an encounter, and different postures go together better (or worse) than others. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6kGdwa27i2zaQhVt6Go8JWiXigyc-LhLttiKncx_e5lvCxDIaOKI1kxBKQsNNLsg-G3BKMz4sF4xHV2G4BZRhCS24iCWvUn59lr58iRheize68OiMzjAOa_DBGCSkqThP-j4-8v7OTu8ZuN1-iyPVpKQ6i2d9nwwGVAbmxEVuJNgycCmCqbZtgIbL/s1000/Cocktails-Bartenders-Should-Know.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="1000" height="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6kGdwa27i2zaQhVt6Go8JWiXigyc-LhLttiKncx_e5lvCxDIaOKI1kxBKQsNNLsg-G3BKMz4sF4xHV2G4BZRhCS24iCWvUn59lr58iRheize68OiMzjAOa_DBGCSkqThP-j4-8v7OTu8ZuN1-iyPVpKQ6i2d9nwwGVAbmxEVuJNgycCmCqbZtgIbL/w465-h279/Cocktails-Bartenders-Should-Know.jpeg" width="465" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>Consider the role of posture in cooking and cocktails. The chef, or barkeep, navigates the postures of ingredients — the way lemon juice mixes with the booze to create a sour is distinct from how a twist, with its oils, coats the booze. A squeeze and a twist: two different postures. This is precisely the job of a chef or bar tender: to negotiate the postures of the ingredients — and, hopefully, the postures of their intended audience. </div><div><br /></div><div>While posture is an aspect of any body, it is not a stable trait. Posture is a verb, a manner of standing <i>towards </i>and <i>with </i>other bodies and forces. Posture is a component of a body's style, its way of going which includes speed, temperature, intensity, and weight (which is <i>mass</i> inflected by a body's environs). One way to look at posture is as the shape of a body's style, a puzzle piece within a cosmic puzzle that relentlessly morphs. Even if bodies are in constant motion, they still have shape — or, perhaps, shaping. </div><div><br /></div><div>I think of when an old friend of mine and I would go walking through nature. She'd leave the path, touch everything she could, smell everything she could. Me, I would walk tenderly through the brushes, my hands often in my pockets, my feet on the trail. My posture was one of reserve, of letting the nature around me abound. Her posture was more, well, gregarious, active, her tendrils stretching out to the tendrils of trees — like the person who's louder at a party, she liked to be loud in her conversation with nature. Neither is right or wrong. There is zero judgment here. It's a matter of posture, of posturing.</div><div><br /></div><div>We carry ourselves in the world in such and such a way which, in turn, inflects and is inflected by other surrounding bodies. The words we use to describe such posturing are demanding, accommodating, passive and active, obsequious, ingratiating. Each describes a manner of standing towards other bodies in the world. This act of posturing is one aspect of our way of going in the world: it's the shape with which we engage things. </div>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-31759428675824504902022-03-22T16:07:00.006-07:002022-03-23T18:15:54.456-07:00Walking the Talk—and Vice-Versa: On Allison Leigh Holt's "Stitching the Future with Clues"<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUndggfzf1Ye_Ce6qFjsiQ2QaYTarhrmWkjSON8eLNvlFUM5pexuVO_asvEUwvcgKdN8jwXDSiLo1YlGJAiWAetghKnwUPDOtVszqbt25BqgPJWFx2MJgzz69uTHC2m582JnVhn1U0wzkCCTR3E2Ru_SuYXk2mkBwTnx9G9PjOlZ7HPl6jGJ8UzLEJ/s1920/HOLT_Stitching_fugue.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUndggfzf1Ye_Ce6qFjsiQ2QaYTarhrmWkjSON8eLNvlFUM5pexuVO_asvEUwvcgKdN8jwXDSiLo1YlGJAiWAetghKnwUPDOtVszqbt25BqgPJWFx2MJgzz69uTHC2m582JnVhn1U0wzkCCTR3E2Ru_SuYXk2mkBwTnx9G9PjOlZ7HPl6jGJ8UzLEJ/w555-h312/HOLT_Stitching_fugue.jpg" width="555" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: xx-small;">Allison Holt is an artist, theorist, and teacher working with video, sound, glass, maps, words, and more to present the mechanics, and critical importance, of neurodivergence across all aspects of life. Her 2021 video, "Stitching the Future with Clue," at once explains and performs the enormous complexity of, well, complexity—of the feedback loops and ecological operations that permeate, if not indeed define, life. <a href="https://vimeo.com/647940094" target="_blank"> Watch a three-minute excerpt here.</a> You can <a href="https://www.oillyoowen.com/" target="_blank">learn more about Holt's work here. </a></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Let's say I want to tell you, explain to you, that we live inside of a series of ever emergent feedback loops —as the artist, theorist, and teacher, Allison Holt does (if you'll excuse this temporary reduction of her complex, thoroughly fleshed out position). Or, rather, I want to explain to you that it's not really that you live inside these ever emergent feedback loops — as if you were living, say, in some underwater hotel — but that you are at once constituted by and constitutive of these loops. You are not a guest at that hotel; you're built into its very structure. </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Well, I could tell you as I just did. But here's the thing: written language really wants to move in a straight line. Look at these sentences. They move left to right, assembling sense as they go more or less like a factory assembly line. So when I tell you that you are always already living amid, and indeed <i>as</i>, feedback loops, I do so in a straight line, belying my very pedagogic intent. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">How will you understand non-linearity if all you ever hear is linearity? You'll walk away, thinking me a fool. Or, worse, you'll think what I said is <i>cool</i>, a novelty, and hence feel no need to pursue its effects, its logic, its ability to rewrite you and the world around you. Ah, but if you experience it at the same time, the effects will resound unto infinity. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">No doubt, language is never solely linear. In fact, as Jacques Derrida and so many others have shown us, language always goes astray—it bleeds, proliferates, sprawls in different directions whether you want it to or not. Derrida enjoyed this play of language, creating a mode of reading he called <i>deconstruction</i> which seeks to amplify the drift inherent to any utterance. A long litany of writers have made language move in all kinds of ways, forging new modes of sense that will never have been linear — William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Douglas Kearney, Lisa Robertson. The list goes on and on. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span>But, most of the time, these writ</span>ers don't <i>explain </i>the play of language: they <i>perform </i>it. That is, as their writing folds and winds, you can go along for the ride. But if you don't get it, you'll jump off before it gets very far. (I no longer recommend Burroughs unless I have a keen sense of the reader.) How, then, can someone explain the non-linearity of life without straightening out the kinks or being so kinky that all explanation frays and evaporates? How can you walk the talk of feedback loops while, at the same time, talking the walk? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Enter Allison Holt and her astounding video, "Stitching the Future with Clues" (2021). In 14 minutes and 30 seconds, she at once explains and performs the recursive nature of existence. She does this as she's always done throughout her practice: by operating at the junctures where clear distinctions between telling and doing, science and art, knowledge and performance give way to a much richer medium—and hence a more resonant pedagogy. </span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Throughout the video, Holt deploys a breadth of tactics—words, animations, images, graphs, lights, sounds. We could say the art "uses" and "incorporates" documentary and science. This, in fact, is the very premise of the film: life is an ever-emerging set of dialogues and conversations between systems of every sort—human, vegetal, cosmic, conceptual, linguistic, microbial. The film, then, is a conversation between science, art, and (for lack of a better description) ethical philosophy. It at once argues, shows, and preaches. No one mode is subservient to another. Rather, they conspire together, a network of sense-making modes conversing with each other.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiytPXC4iPW4Mkga3fMmNtK4bAHJIuJIFHTtT_X9Nq_6CDDjhYQXvB3zTJodtoketkOWWSXYx9Da5glSQ4O2sMtSkZfS7dPDWgM_69u48pZS8rp6Ftlij61K3m5kKucQ7j3nB7e23_gqe3b4U17v_gBDfdHQmeDWPPHS5qWI4idimrQp3dciXXXSnSJ/s1920/cam_monitor%20copy.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiytPXC4iPW4Mkga3fMmNtK4bAHJIuJIFHTtT_X9Nq_6CDDjhYQXvB3zTJodtoketkOWWSXYx9Da5glSQ4O2sMtSkZfS7dPDWgM_69u48pZS8rp6Ftlij61K3m5kKucQ7j3nB7e23_gqe3b4U17v_gBDfdHQmeDWPPHS5qWI4idimrQp3dciXXXSnSJ/w400-h225/cam_monitor%20copy.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTgekrCRSgEBc18Ok8GvZRDiIpgpdndCy47GMp5cH6RwcxudhS8M9wweuGyerXG8J4ChSHSfDu2pbRwT6XAVKT9mVm3fKl6nnA0-0L4WebdCTnaLTg1E0rXQ59RIyGIJ4PcdehOW5zi0suKxHakQGQysYGB_VRZ32ieOHJngfEE_6lsNzM1W00ycVc/s1920/globe_04.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTgekrCRSgEBc18Ok8GvZRDiIpgpdndCy47GMp5cH6RwcxudhS8M9wweuGyerXG8J4ChSHSfDu2pbRwT6XAVKT9mVm3fKl6nnA0-0L4WebdCTnaLTg1E0rXQ59RIyGIJ4PcdehOW5zi0suKxHakQGQysYGB_VRZ32ieOHJngfEE_6lsNzM1W00ycVc/w400-h225/globe_04.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">No doubt, the film talks to us, explaining to us in a linear fashion. Within the film, however, the words are one system, one register and mode of sense making, in conversation with images, diagrams, sound, and performance, which have their own modes of sense making. Just as McLuhan and Quentin Fiore disrupt and refuse any hierarchy between words and images in their <i>Medium is the Massag</i>e, Holt's piece places these modes of sense making into a state of play where they mutually inflect each other. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I hate to use the word I'm about to use but I believe Holt's piece, and her work in general, is important. Why? Because it breaks down the false barriers that keep knowledge siloed and experience a secondary, rather than primary, function of knowing. Art and science remain disparate at their own peril. Their intertwining, which takes up qualitative experience alongside the go-to quantitative will of science and mathematics, promises us the very universe itself. Only by bringing these two into conversation do we begin to glimpse the profound, exquisite complexity of knowledge, of the universe, of life. In "Stitching the Future with Clues," Holt has done nothing less than lay the basis for a new mode of knowing—perhaps just in the nick of time. </span></div><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;">"Stitching the Future with Clues," 2021</span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;">Created by Allison Leigh Holt<br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;">Runtime 14 min. 30 sec.</span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;">Sound: Thomas Dimuzio<br /></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;">Video feedback: Kit Young</span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;">Live camera: Paul Helzer</span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;">Animations: Allison Leigh Holt, Corey Michael Smithson, Erik Klein Brinke, Yuto Horikawa, Robert Hodgins, Sci Pills, The Daily Mail, and The OPTE Project</span></div>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-85020692541770835282022-03-01T10:35:00.008-08:002022-03-01T10:35:58.237-08:00The Art of Affect in Film<p><a href="https://dcoffeen.medium.com/the-art-of-affect-in-film-4cb48a58a692"> Please visit my Medium where I'm posting these days as this interface is horrible ></a></p><p><br /></p><p>I talk about <i>Spencer</i>, <i>Inherent Vice,</i> the films of Sofia Coppola and John Cassavetes — and more! The affect of film is not the affect of its characters or story; characters become inhuman affective forces.....</p>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-43149511787464528482021-09-27T18:17:00.004-07:002022-02-23T17:52:18.281-08:00Don’t Teach Classes. Craft Courses.<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">A “class” is a physical space—static, hence indifferent to the rhythm of pedagogy. A course, </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">however, is</span><span class="hj" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: georgia; font-style: inherit;"> a</span><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">movement—a choreography of knowledge, understanding, revelation, and affect. A course is less a map of a subject than a particular tour through a domain.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://dcoffeen.medium.com/dont-teach-classes-craft-courses-7d25313701b8">Read the whole post on Medium ></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3udK3t2qBhHP_3GZZ0v20XJSBjE9KBkWTyZmQ2LGah5Bzhcyw-pt_U0eN6U2YAmyQf5kAulwOqxnO3Eykwek76uo3byc5kowRcOjz3kzKtJillZRgkHsdoY7zcvoMbYQ9tb-a2VLjgDs/s701/Screen+Shot+2021-09-27+at+5.57.44+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="525" data-original-width="701" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3udK3t2qBhHP_3GZZ0v20XJSBjE9KBkWTyZmQ2LGah5Bzhcyw-pt_U0eN6U2YAmyQf5kAulwOqxnO3Eykwek76uo3byc5kowRcOjz3kzKtJillZRgkHsdoY7zcvoMbYQ9tb-a2VLjgDs/s320/Screen+Shot+2021-09-27+at+5.57.44+PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4QDODuSTK5pwKhE_Evz5EPMgTaA-6Nd6iVxi_Aog2azeHzRlbOsmKsLr41VronYeZZaA1r4_qhyphenhyphenMrWTBHivD3rQiFfDr_ZDgNfoRtbdpitSEO6HLw4LX-usAgL0185InPudWMmGJFICQ/s698/Screen+Shot+2021-09-27+at+5.57.33+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="526" data-original-width="698" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4QDODuSTK5pwKhE_Evz5EPMgTaA-6Nd6iVxi_Aog2azeHzRlbOsmKsLr41VronYeZZaA1r4_qhyphenhyphenMrWTBHivD3rQiFfDr_ZDgNfoRtbdpitSEO6HLw4LX-usAgL0185InPudWMmGJFICQ/s320/Screen+Shot+2021-09-27+at+5.57.33+PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipSwlMkTI7PrvbsHpADeddt-tUYjqxwxtBEOHcdcaUPog4bqeG5ogdxwOl2WUNUaqBcCmrMNCHxjeLG9hPWTEuKWNkfV6V0GO8ajq5rAr499FTgXo7Un5IkbbZMH1QpcUh8YFJgWlWIsc/s699/Screen+Shot+2021-09-27+at+5.57.20+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="526" data-original-width="699" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipSwlMkTI7PrvbsHpADeddt-tUYjqxwxtBEOHcdcaUPog4bqeG5ogdxwOl2WUNUaqBcCmrMNCHxjeLG9hPWTEuKWNkfV6V0GO8ajq5rAr499FTgXo7Un5IkbbZMH1QpcUh8YFJgWlWIsc/s320/Screen+Shot+2021-09-27+at+5.57.20+PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-3978969625849748692021-08-31T15:02:00.000-07:002021-08-31T15:02:21.003-07:00Take My Online Seminar on Deleuze & Guattari Starting 9/7. It'll Be Fantastic. <p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYq9HyUN1Beqnz3JpOngiRLjqv5ovVv4TngPbzqOH-c08FBH6sZoQFc76gFinbNNKltXr0r82rV0k6UoJ-w9jMydrTg_HFZZTLWnfSN8wvrh9Re9EvTau3nTeDewjK4Aq8tCyDSbZ8Ty0/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><img alt="" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="293" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYq9HyUN1Beqnz3JpOngiRLjqv5ovVv4TngPbzqOH-c08FBH6sZoQFc76gFinbNNKltXr0r82rV0k6UoJ-w9jMydrTg_HFZZTLWnfSN8wvrh9Re9EvTau3nTeDewjK4Aq8tCyDSbZ8Ty0/w293-h293/image.png" width="293" /></span></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Take my online seminar on D&G. It'll be over three consecutive Tuesdays in September — September 7, 14, & 21 at 5:30 PT/8:30 ET. <a href="https://renegadeuniversity.com/product/deleuze-and-guattari/">Enroll here. </a></span></i></p><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">I could not be more excited to be teaching a live, if virtual, seminar on the great French philosophical duo of Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari for the venerable Renegade University (where I also have a recorded course on Nietzsche). As a former professor in Berkeley's famed Rhetoric Department, I instinctively create course descriptions and readings. So here it is.</span></p><div class="" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><b class=""><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Thinking (Everything) Differently: On Deleuze and Deleuze & Guattari</span></b></div><div class="" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">In his introduction to Deleuze & Guattari’s first book, “Anti-Oedipus,” Michel Foucault suggests that the title could have been “An Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.” Indeed, for Deleuze, and Deleuze & Guattari (this course will discuss the difference), attempts to create a ground that doesn’t move — “big” philosophical questions, identity, reason, representation — erase the difference of things, the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i class="">thisness<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i><span class="">(haecceity)</span><i class=""> </i>of me, you, this or that idea, blade of grass, mosquito. This will to ground life restricts and controls the tumultuous and relentless play of life—it’s a kind of masochism: life hating itself. It's also a form of control, of fascism, much of which we inflict on ourselves via our internal fascist. </span></div><div class="" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br class="" /></span></div><div class="" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">So throughout their writing, Deleuze & Guattari create concepts, figures, and operations that allow us not just to think differently but to think difference itself as it moves through the world, ever becoming, morphing, dissolving. The result is an admittedly strange world—they call it science fiction—in which everything is in motion with everything else, commingling (and not), as geological, vegetal, cosmic, and animal forces flow this way and that as bodies and forms shift and flow and change. The result is a radical reorganizing of everything — of philosophy, knowledge, personhood, logic, politics, freedom. This can make reading them difficult. After all, they never give you a map or overview of their world as no such thing exists: there is no outside the great teem of life. </span></div><div class="" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br class="" /></span></div><div class="" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">In this course, we’ll talk about how to read them (and why they write the way they write) and the worlds they create. And then we’ll dig into some of their beautiful concepts, figures, and operations such as difference in itself (haecceity), repetition, the rhizome, becoming-x, a Body without Organs (BwO), schizoanalysis, immanence, assemblages, lines of flight, territorialization (as well as re- and deterritorialization), and others. It’ll be a wild ride, I assure you, as you’ll be nudged to think in ways you’ve never even imagined existed.</span></div><div class="" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br class="" /></span></div><div class="" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Readings:</b></span></div><div class="" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Anti-Oedipus</b>, "Preface" by Michel Foucault; "Desiring-Machines"</span></li><li><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>What is Philosophy?</b> "Intro"; "What is a Concept?"; maybe "Plane of Immanence"</span></span></li><li><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Thousand Plateaus</b>, Forward by Brian Massumi; "Rhizome"; "Of the Refrain" (maybe some others)</span></span></li><li><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Much of Deleuze's book on<b> Francis Bacon</b></span></span></li></ul></div><div class="" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><br /></div>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-88578163434549911912021-08-09T14:50:00.001-07:002021-08-09T14:50:11.194-07:00Back on the Unregistered Podcast<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="384" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-Yw-w8QDxdo" width="462" youtube-src-id="-Yw-w8QDxdo"></iframe></div><br /><p>Talking about math in a world of undulating flux; how Deleuze and Guattari foment and proliferate difference; Marshal McLuhan's concept of the environment and how the alphabet creates a certain world; and so much more!</p>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-76058449604120812512021-07-04T20:15:00.004-07:002021-07-04T20:15:41.583-07:00The Textured Screen<p><a href="https://dcoffeen.medium.com/the-textured-screen-340251235f07"><span style="font-size: medium;">Please visit Medium for an essay on how the materiality of the screen as an inflection point within the image experience—with reference to:</span></a></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Steven Soderbergh's "No Sudden Move", Matisse's "The Dance", Frank Stella, Kara Walker, Matthew Ritchie, Robert Altman, Marc Lafia, and more!</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMwUyJ3W997gwI3RYjLN2jbxE8b8nsxrvGku7X7pGLsp7rrn1D_LQES2EePLp98zqe50MGoawlDSM11Cu7krKdBld7l2Vc3qKUOgleCQk-2G-mhizr2ZKEEEBnOvbAryO8hL5sfTYftDU/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="588" data-original-width="900" height="371" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMwUyJ3W997gwI3RYjLN2jbxE8b8nsxrvGku7X7pGLsp7rrn1D_LQES2EePLp98zqe50MGoawlDSM11Cu7krKdBld7l2Vc3qKUOgleCQk-2G-mhizr2ZKEEEBnOvbAryO8hL5sfTYftDU/w568-h371/image.png" width="568" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-48718275329262164702021-06-02T13:06:00.001-07:002021-06-02T13:06:36.960-07:00Me! On The Ethics Experts Podcast<p> You can listen to the whole thing on many streaming sites — including Spotify: <a href="https://lnkd.in/enCz3bq" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-size-adjust: auto;" target="_blank">https://lnkd.in/enCz3bq</a></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='308' height='256' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dwDD84aih7h6zVCxkaLQXRy1PR13XaC1BBA5sz5DrknWpfSSH7JmjV0OWUafQdcUvIu-ygaYgQQBIvi3c1OBA' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-816540191395743712021-05-27T13:53:00.004-07:002021-05-27T13:53:38.164-07:00Photographic Memory: On Raoul Ollman’s “Reflections”<p style="text-align: center;"><i>(I continue to publish on Medium as Blogger is a piece of shit. To wit, I keep getting an error as I try to upload images...)</i></p><p><br /></p><p><em class="ic" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #292929; font-family: charter, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.063px;">Whether it’s black and white shots of the Bay Bridge, portraits of friends, or lush color images of reflections in Manhattan windows, Ollman’s subject remains the same: he photographs time.</em></p><p><a href="https://dcoffeen.medium.com/photographic-memory-on-raoul-ollmans-reflections-9e9c4de0e7dd">Read the essay which talks about photography, time, perception, memory.</a>...it's pretty good, I have to say. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-19085726119491462762021-04-15T15:21:00.003-07:002021-04-15T15:21:37.343-07:00Behold This Non-Fungible Vagina (NFV), or The Multiple Event of Emergent Particularity in the Digital Age<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="Medium: https://dcoffeen.medium.com/behold-this-non-fungible-vagina-nfv-or-the-multiple-event-of-emergent-particularity-in-the-513b7f0bab3a"> Check out this nutty essay on this NFT/NFV that I wrote on Medium</a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9VfqxuE5q8_e6tDtzvRiRy_LXM3fpg15mTttXwsDRyYBYwrlWXt7zWDXDizfrvB8W8VQhy65fw3Hvv-GEBI4OGvw1nyKoTeVd7jZq5jtpL9_PYcSdSfSZKaNIQSN3Oc6gLRgp1hUtopA/s1516/Flower-of-Life---final.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1516" data-original-width="1213" height="387" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9VfqxuE5q8_e6tDtzvRiRy_LXM3fpg15mTttXwsDRyYBYwrlWXt7zWDXDizfrvB8W8VQhy65fw3Hvv-GEBI4OGvw1nyKoTeVd7jZq5jtpL9_PYcSdSfSZKaNIQSN3Oc6gLRgp1hUtopA/w310-h387/Flower-of-Life---final.jpeg" width="310" /></a></div><br /><h1 class="fm cz fn au co fo fp fq fr fs ft fu fv fw fx fy fz ga gb gc gd ge gf gg gh gi dw" id="698c" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #292929; font-family: sohne, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 46px; letter-spacing: -0.011em; line-height: 56px; margin: 0.6em 0px -0.27em;"><br /></h1>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-88685169705849411592021-04-15T15:18:00.004-07:002021-04-15T15:18:33.946-07:00Me on the Hobbies with Robbie Podcast Discussing Rhetoric, Whippets, and Inherent Pleasure<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="342" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LQowLcRpaXQ" width="489" youtube-src-id="LQowLcRpaXQ"></iframe></div><br /><p></p>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-36549175466062839232021-03-29T19:07:00.004-07:002021-03-29T19:07:41.474-07:00Squiggles All the Way Down: On the Painting of Phil King<p>I believe I've reached the limit of being able to tolerate this horrible UX known as Blogger. So here's an essay I wrote on Medium that I quite like about the work of the great British painter (not sure why "British" matters), Phil King. <a href="https://dcoffeen.medium.com/squiggles-all-the-way-down-on-the-painting-of-phil-king-d911a71126ae">Here you go. Thank's for stopping by.</a> </p><p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjenvhtoEUx3ZLgcs8gfNkrVrKRMH9gqLB8op_gxR7ndB13mdqMlzvzSAlJTaf3IfNW_vQmooOrD3IVacjc4EKTTXLxaeMFyJQmBGkQX4SkQ1wZJRh-89s_MA6XPejpY6gsU0cmrHEvQ5g/s1280/tumblr_np8h5u5Axf1tx8ox5o1_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="942" data-original-width="1280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjenvhtoEUx3ZLgcs8gfNkrVrKRMH9gqLB8op_gxR7ndB13mdqMlzvzSAlJTaf3IfNW_vQmooOrD3IVacjc4EKTTXLxaeMFyJQmBGkQX4SkQ1wZJRh-89s_MA6XPejpY6gsU0cmrHEvQ5g/s320/tumblr_np8h5u5Axf1tx8ox5o1_1280.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTQvwvyehA0IOew2hnQZJayxcin9TT2PDHd3hE4VzlFguZowOH8SlL0PD98CvaPeXjSnJsGgaORBlZ00xIxHVWGeVIU91B6xMmpMjBAWXOzH6HOJ4gQfDJQ94xOZnk0N-pzwNIclK6YcU/s390/129018170_10221439372591376_750699678356203918_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="390" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTQvwvyehA0IOew2hnQZJayxcin9TT2PDHd3hE4VzlFguZowOH8SlL0PD98CvaPeXjSnJsGgaORBlZ00xIxHVWGeVIU91B6xMmpMjBAWXOzH6HOJ4gQfDJQ94xOZnk0N-pzwNIclK6YcU/s320/129018170_10221439372591376_750699678356203918_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEignuT0vNlf6idPSyd-yiIWIrs9TQtnn4xKCw03t1WJRoy-mGQMnHfEmQqy91WuF9L3_8d364iJ_aQxkbGc9R_UtqyktjWsvqaggSe1vuftxpZ9WikeBlCgkf6-rQdkVus3jHCMLsPThWk/s1161/22829941_10212414973147030_7914467597059351792_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1161" data-original-width="917" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEignuT0vNlf6idPSyd-yiIWIrs9TQtnn4xKCw03t1WJRoy-mGQMnHfEmQqy91WuF9L3_8d364iJ_aQxkbGc9R_UtqyktjWsvqaggSe1vuftxpZ9WikeBlCgkf6-rQdkVus3jHCMLsPThWk/s320/22829941_10212414973147030_7914467597059351792_o.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p></p>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-70346111467481498852021-03-21T13:59:00.000-07:002021-03-21T13:59:17.429-07:00Critical Intimacy, Generosity, & How Cameras Let You See Seeing so You Can See the World Anew<p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3dIjViCboVrhbodLghXY2ObMDwMlWH1Tb7gL_OfUHToRugYXW-iQSRa9Jq7Z2xgeu6QAqH_M8I3cWiVuUt13WQWTxSJ8A6FxWsjZdZN65tD7Sus7gdiNGAG2FKLFF8FRMJZ6fQ-jyz5Y/s2048/IMG_0924.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="394" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3dIjViCboVrhbodLghXY2ObMDwMlWH1Tb7gL_OfUHToRugYXW-iQSRa9Jq7Z2xgeu6QAqH_M8I3cWiVuUt13WQWTxSJ8A6FxWsjZdZN65tD7Sus7gdiNGAG2FKLFF8FRMJZ6fQ-jyz5Y/w524-h394/IMG_0924.jpeg" width="524" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Seeing seeing seeing: the camera splays our vision before us, allowing us to see — to see anew. </span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Nothing, save for the occasional sexual encounter, entails the intimacy of critique. </p><p>To critique something is not, as the popular imagination might have it, an obstacle to living or being present. On the contrary, it is precisely to be present to something — to let something else happen, to follow its contours, to see and taste and consider and enjoy its multiple windings, its folds and modes, its scents and sense. </p><p>To critique something is to form what Deleuze and Guattari call a nuptial. In critique, you go together with this thing, entwined. While we tend to imagine critics as standoffish, sitting on the sidelines as life happens proffering quips without sullying themselves, critique in in fact a kind of love. </p><p>To clarify, critique or criticism is not judgement or negative assessment. Sure, teenagers and lovers will often yell,<i> Stop criticizing me</i> as they storm out of the room. But what they really mean is stop <i>judging </i>me. Critique, however, is not inherently judgmental. It may fundamentally operate at the level of judgement; critiquing this and not that is judgement. But to critique is not to give a thumbs up or thumbs down. </p><p>Critique suspends such gestures for being radically local (<i>my</i> taste) and so, finally, banal. Unless I know you intimately, I don't care whether you <i>like </i>something or not. Your critique of something, however, offers the greatest promise there is: <i>to see something anew.</i> To see something in a way that I could not have seen. Critique is the radical act of multiplying the possibilities of a thing. And, when the critic shares this vision, we readers are in turn opened, multiplied. Reading your critique that opens something else — a dish of food, a book, an idea, a person, a film — I in turn open.</p><p>As I said, critique is not without judgement. But this judgement is implicit: if you're critiquing something, you're saying that that thing is worth knowing, crawling into, following, knowing, metabolizing, sensing: loving. A critique is judgment just as introducing a close friend or lover to other friends is: we can safely assume that because you're critiquing it, it is worth our time and energy. By choosing to critique something, a critic tells the wold <i>This is a friend of ours. </i></p><p>This isn't always the case, of course. <a href="http://vinylisheavy.blogspot.com/2008/12/cure-of-misanthropy-on-wall-e-kubrick.html" target="_blank">I once wrote a harshly judgmental critique of Pixar's Wall-E</a> as a guest post on <a href="https://rylandwalkerknight.com/" target="_blank">Ryland Knight's</a> great film blog. I don't usually like to spend any energy thinking or writing or talking about things I don't like. As critique is so intimate, I only want to critique things that enthuse me, vitalize me, intrigue me. In the case of "Wall-E," I saw it with my young son and, to make the experience more enjoyable for myself, I leaned in and articulated precisely why I loathed it. I made the best of the situation. </p><p>Why'd I then spend the time writing my critique and sharing it? Well, because intimacy and engagement are complex experiences. Sometimes we sleep with or have intense flings with people we don't really like. While the wise thing to do is just to shut it down, at times intimacy with things we don't like is edifying, exciting, engaging at some level. </p><p>In any and all cases, though, critique is not judgment. Critique is empirical. To be empirical is to be awash in another thing, to take it up and let it take you up and see what happens, what comes, what new possibilities of life emerge. </p><p>I feel like there's a common assumption that cameras, while fun to use out and about with friends, are a layer between you and the world.<i> Stop filming and just live</i> is a common sentiment even as photography is ubiquitous. But I've found that the camera in my pocket is a path to the world, a way of engaging that is deeply intimate. When I take a picture, rather than just seeing the world with all my blindness of assumptions and habit, <i>I see my seeing of the world! Right here on my phone! </i></p><p>After all, most of the time, I'm not really seeing the world. I'm moving through it. The things I see are already known, have already been seen and so are not seen at all — some cars, trees, people, clouds, garbage. It's rare for the world to pop from this background of familiarity to present itself as something, as a force to reckon, as a thing that demands I stop and let myself be reoriented.</p><p>And yet we've all had that experience of being stopped in our tracks by an exquisite sky, a huge moon, a streaming sunset, a beautiful person, someone out of control on drugs or madness or life itself. We may even tell others about it: <i>You won't believe what I saw today! </i>Or: <i>Did you see that sky as the storm came in? </i>So, yes, we all know that sometimes, something removes itself from the blurry din of the quotidian to announce itself as something that is so resonant that we tell other people that we saw it. Most of the time, we don't talk about the things we've seen because most of the time we go about half blind. That's not a good or bad thing. It's a matter of fact. </p><p>In taking out my phone-camera to photograph something splays the everyday event of my seeing before me. And in so doing, renders my very seeing foreign: the camera moves from my seeing from behind my eyes to the front of my eyes. As I photograph, I move my actual seeing around the world, letting it take up that view, that face, that branch from angles and proximity and freshness my eyes simply can't. </p><p>In this case, the camera is not a layer between me and the world. It's not an obstacle to living life. On the contrary, the camera removes the film my eyes, allowing me see something with startling intimacy, my lens running its lengths, shifting perspectives, first here then there, as I move about seeking <i>the best way to see the thing</i>. That's what taking pictures asks of us: What is the best way to see? The camera removes seeing from the realm of habit and makes it an event that seeks the best of itself. (Is <i>best</i> the best word? No, in that there is no absolute. I use <i>best</i> here in the colloquial sense.)</p><p>Such is critique: it's a mode of photography. When we critique something — a book, film, chair — we take it up, frame it, and repeat it. When we critique something, that something makes an impression on us and we, in turn, make an impression on it. </p><p>Which is why we should all be discerning when it comes to doing critique. You don't want to be so intimate with something that drains your energy, your vitality, that doesn't infuse you. Imagine reading the work of a writer you hate and spending years not just reading the work but thinking about it, letting it play across your mind and life, trying to articulate its ways of going, its sense. You'd have to dwell in something that saps you — which is masochistic. </p><p>When I taught — at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute — I only taught books, essays, films, music that I enjoyed living with and so wanted my students to enjoy living with. I never put one thing on the syllabus that I didn't think was great and capable of recreating the reader in the very act of critique. I couldn't imagine teaching an essay that I thought was terrible. Eeesh! That'd just be cruel — to me and them.</p><p>As I've said, this doesn't mean that I have <i>to like</i> all these texts. I once had a former MFA student ask me to write about his work for a gallery show. He invited me to his studio and said, <i>I know you don't really like my work. But I'd like your take on it.</i> And he was right: I didn't particularly like his work. But I thoroughly enjoyed sitting with it, digesting it, making sense of it, and finally writing my critique of it — a critique absent any thumbs up or down. Someone else might love it, love hanging it on their walls, but not be able or not want to critique it. Critique is love but not all love is critical. </p><p>Critique seeks to infuse the world with the new. Despite its reputation, critique is essentially creative. Just as a painter isn't copying the landscape but creating it anew, the critic sees the painting of the landscape anew. </p><p>And, if nothing else, critique is generous. Rather than standing back from the world, critics throw themselves into the mix. All critique is, at some point, gonzo. </p><p>No doubt, not all love and immersion in something is critique. Sometimes, we just want to be enraptured without organizing that rapture, without contemplating it, without talking about it. That's a beautiful experience — and generous with the thing at hand. </p><p>But critique does something else. It lets itself be taken up and then seeks to show both that thing and the world precisely how it is so amazing. Critique, then, not only sees the world anew: it invites the world to do so, as well. </p>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-81813770152675346102021-03-11T10:56:00.000-08:002021-03-11T10:56:13.465-08:00Lamenting the End of HBO & the Rise of Disposable TV<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicMgCOzs-zPie18YSTPZoi9IxjZdu9yBWS6YGE7q9DZaOs1hRvboCqxDCP_XEhJNX7_oaCGU6y5HIUebVAg0OPr1wCo8nTrkAEjHkL0AOVPf7nD63e2h_8BVsoZRG7fHIbEND4TMUpCto/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="629" data-original-width="1198" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicMgCOzs-zPie18YSTPZoi9IxjZdu9yBWS6YGE7q9DZaOs1hRvboCqxDCP_XEhJNX7_oaCGU6y5HIUebVAg0OPr1wCo8nTrkAEjHkL0AOVPf7nD63e2h_8BVsoZRG7fHIbEND4TMUpCto/w511-h268/image.png" width="511" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />In my lifetime, there is no contest about who has dominated quality television — programs that push the medium, that reinvent what TV can be, shows that have a shelf life beyond the buzz and first viewing: HBO. For me, it started with <i>The Larry Sanders Sho</i>w which premiered in 1992. Since then, consider the shows it has helped create and bring to the world:<p></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Oz, Six Feet Under, Carnivale</i>, and <i>Big Love </i>— all of which, even with their flaws, reveled in complexity of story and character and humor</li><li>A series of David Milch series which introduced a level of writing that TV may never see again including the draw dropping visual and literary prowess of <i>Deadwood</i> along with the short-lived but ambitious <i>John from Cincinnati</i> and the Michael Mann co-created, <i>Luck</i></li><li><i>The Leftovers,</i> an often overlooked mini-masterpiece of beauty, pathos, and madness (which <a href="https://dcoffeen.medium.com/uncertainty-stories-all-the-way-down-on-the-beauty-brilliance-of-hbos-the-leftovers-6b281dc62496" target="_blank">I wrote about here ></a>)</li><li><i>The Sopranos</i> — about which it is difficult not to wax on with its baseline complexity, the devastating acting of both James Gandolfini and Edie Falco, the impossible commixture of sentiment and comedy</li><li>All the great David Simon programs from the revolutionary <i>The Wire</i> to <i>Treme</i>, <i>The Deuce</i>, <i>Generation Kill,</i> and others — all of which operate with a basic respect for the intelligence of the audience as Simon refuses exposition, thrusting us into stories mid-stream as characters toss about obscure jargon that is never explained</li><li><i>Enlightened</i>, the Laura Dern vehicle driven by the devilish intelligence of Mike White, a show that enjoys a voice you can never place, somewhere between satire, melodrama, and sitcom — an HBO signature</li><li><i>Sex and the City</i> — say what you will, the show remains brilliant in its form and use of conceptual personae</li><li>The over the top brilliance of writing, character, production, and definition of a zeitgeist, <i>Girls</i></li><li><i>Curb Your Enthusiasm</i> which, alas, is one of the few things in the public eye that makes me feel less alone in this world — and that ups the ante on the ground altering <i>Seinfeld</i></li><li><i>Veep! </i>What is there to say? The velocity, complexity, and depth of its humor is self-evident — and showcases the astounding genius of Julia-Louise Dreyfus in a way that is simply unparalleled.</li><li><i>Silicon Valley, Tenacious D, Bored to Death, </i>and<i> High Maintenance </i>(more about that in a moment), to name a few of its sparkling comedies, each proffering a rarely seen sophistication in both form and content</li></ul><p></p><p>I mean c'mon: That is a ridiculous list for one network to produce! And what makes it so striking is a conspicuous through line that shows a method at work: an unabashed, even aggressive, demand for complexity that is based in a respect for its audience and a deep understanding of the multiple and ever moving contours of life and television.</p><p>Take two programs that began life elsewhere, <i>High Maintenance</i> and <i>The Leftovers</i>. <i>High Maintenance</i> was a web series of short, punchy episodes that highlighted quirk and a cool set up — a guy delivering pot to funky New Yorkers. Once HBO got their hands on it, they turned it into experimental cinema, as quirk and story took a distinct backseat to affect and visual beauty. They did the same thing with <i>The Leftovers:</i> they started with the source material, a book, that they then blew wide open into sprawling, epic, poetic beauty and madness. As Tom Perrotta, author of <u>The Leftovers</u>, writes, "It's been an amazing experience working on the show, watching <i>The Leftovers</i> expand beyond the boundaries of the novel. The show's becoming increasingly rich and deep and wild over the years — it's starting to make my book feel like an acorn that's blossomed into a huge and majestic oak tree." </p><p>How often does that happen? Isn't it almost always the other way around — filmmakers take novels and reduce their complexity? Not in the hands of HBO during its great run.</p><p>Consider the programming of HBO's would-be rival, Showtime. A show like <i>Dexter</i> is high concept, for sure, but in execution the show runners reduce complexity as they flesh the concept out. For the most part, the characters in the show who aren't Dexter are cardboard or just plain old banal. The same goes for Showtime's <i>Weeds</i> — another high concept that, in execution, gets less complex. Compare it to HBO's <i>The Wire </i>in which every single character, regardless of how short their screen time, is an inflection point of note — a rich life. </p><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdnwa-DymRepbXAPL5UJVeA2udEvPOeBYamEReT3mtIY2ZsYPwbQhsbl3f-phmTaa0JR0YY9LdMJLMPQPuJruph6luZhtSwNdsMVL6vOshc4v1YlG94We7H0Jb7UCkgQEMGYZwYj518pM/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="138" data-original-width="364" height="121" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdnwa-DymRepbXAPL5UJVeA2udEvPOeBYamEReT3mtIY2ZsYPwbQhsbl3f-phmTaa0JR0YY9LdMJLMPQPuJruph6luZhtSwNdsMVL6vOshc4v1YlG94We7H0Jb7UCkgQEMGYZwYj518pM/" width="320" /></a></div><br />When I was a blossoming late teen in college, I stumbled on a record label called 4AD. It was my first awareness that among all the artists, there was another force at work: the label. Of course, usually a label has little discernment other than a profit motive. 4AD was clearly of another nature. From a quick review of bands they release, you can see <i>taste</i> at work — from Bauhaus, This Mortal Coil, and Dead Can Dance through to the Pixies, Throwing Muses, and The Breeders to today's Deerhunter, Big Thief, and Purity Ring. When I'd be perusing albums back in the day, if I saw the 4AD logo, I was inclined to give it a shot because I trusted their taste.<p></p><p></p><p>HBO has been just such a label for television programs. They no doubt produce some crappy movies and sensationalist documentaries (it was not surprising that, for a bit, they partnered with Vice). But when it came to TV shows, they were consistently great. They invested time and money into creating shows that are astoundingly complex, that demand a lot of the audience, that are not for casual watching. Even a less financially expensive show such as <i>Veep </i>operates with a tone of such subtlety, multivalences, and a baseline complexity. It's never that VP Meyers is incompetent or cruel or stupid or even just ambitious even if, at times, she is all of those things. Where <i>Veep</i> could easily have become slapstick or the banal satire of, say, Prime's <i>Boys</i>, it instead dances and plays as it moves between and among humor, pathos, satire, slapstick, and insight.</p><p>And then there was the straight up financial investment. During its first few seasons, an episode of <i>Game of Thrones</i> averaged six million dollars; in the final season, that average was 15 million. And while there are plenty of possible critiques of the show, the fact is <i>Game of Thrones</i> remains not only outrageously beautiful but, as <i>was </i>the HBO imperative, the show is downright labyrinthine in its plot as it presents a wealth of characters rife with complexity. </p><p>But all that is gone now. HBO has changed its model, phasing out HBO proper and launching HBO Max in its stead. This is a new business model. The HBO of old was a premier cable add on that had a small rotation of hit movies alongside its ever growing and startling original catalogue. You got HBO to watch <i>The Sopranos</i> or <i>Curb</i> or <i>Game of Throne</i>s. Not anymore. HBO Max is designed to compete with all the other streaming services, leveraging its Warner Brothers catalogue (WB owns HBO) so now rather than just HBO's unique shows, you get a back catalogue of all kinds of things — including the forever addictively vapid <i>Friends</i>. </p><p>That <i>could</i> be great — HBO's TV with Warner's movies. But that's not what HBO Max offers. We've witnessed a fundamental shift in business model and hence production. The once great label no longer seeks to create unique programs with long shelf lives that watchers will pay for. Now it's incentivized to create quick and easy programs while buying up popular shows from elsewhere to keep its audience paying that monthly subscription. </p><p>Look at what Netflix creates — nicely produced shows with moments of grace, such as <i>Sex Education</i> or <i>The End of the Fucking World</i>, but that are fundamentally driven to distract people from their miserable lives. Those shows are driven by plot: you don't watch for the characters or insight into life but to find out what happens next, an effective yet easy and finally unsavory tactic. Because once you know what happened, its value is gone. It's disposable TV. </p><p>Like the other streaming services, HBO Max has launched several original series. They are, to say the least, a disappointment. Take two such shows, <i>Search Party</i> and <i>The Flight Attendant</i>. Neither is terrible. In fact, at times both show glimmers of intelligence and some respect for its audience (especially the early seasons of <i>Search Party</i> as it behaves like a very dark satire and send up of millennials as every character is horrible). But the fact is these shows are throwaways. They are driven by narrative cliffhangers, not by the strength of their characters, acting, writing, production, or intelligence. They seem created for the binge generation as each episode leaves you wanting to know what happens next (or not, I suppose). So rather than spending huge amounts of money to create compelling, sophisticated programs, HBO Max creates disposable programs that people will binge and promptly forget.</p><p>This is not just my opinion (although it is also my opinion). I am sure no one at HBO Max believes that <i>The Flight Attendant</i> is great TV that will live on for generations the way <i>The Sopranos, The Wire,</i> or <i>Curb Your Enthusiasm</i> have. I'd say their hearts just aren't in it anymore but it's more than that: they had a heart transplant. And this new heart has one goal: quick, easy, disposable TV that will keep subscribers watching as they scroll Instagram. </p><p>As Terrence McKenna argues, television is a powerful drug: "Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coercion, brainwashing, and manipulation." What McKenna doesn't recognize is what Marshall McLuhan did: an artist operating in a medium has the power to expose and shift the very environment of life, the very terms in which we live. That's what the HBO of old did — created shows that didn't let us go blindly into the abyss. That challenged who we are and what we believe. By refusing to offer reductive exposition, shows like <i>The Sopranos</i> and <i>The Wire</i> incorporate the audience into their very fabric. We, the audience, are a site that holds the complexity. </p><p>But this new wave of disposable TV — that may have better production than the sitcoms of old and may enjoy more frank discussions of sex — functions as a drug to calm the masses amid the increasing madness of the day. We all work so much that, come the end of the day, we just want to watch easy TV — and all the better if it compels us to watch the next one, leaving us hanging and wanting more so it feels like we're living — when, in fact, it's a kind of living death. Which is one reason zombies have become such a popular subject: we are becoming-zombie in the very act of watching these programs (and yet AMC's wildly popular zombie vehicle, <i>The Walking Dead,</i> is actually anti-zombie as it proliferates complexity and beauty, waking us up from the dead as we watch; indeed, AMC has been a notable label as it's produced the brilliant <i>Mad Men</i>, the at times sharp <i>Breaking Bad</i>, the smarter <i>Better Call Saul,</i> among others).</p><p>I admit that I use TV as just such a drug. I watch mediocre programs that engage me just enough but still let me space out, text my friends, do some online shopping. <i>Deadwood</i> does not let you do that. Nor does <i>The Leftovers</i> or <i>The Wire</i>. Tune out for a bit and you've missed it all — not just because you've missed plot points but because you've missed Ian McShane's impossibly subtle shift in timbre as he utters a seemingly simple <i>please</i> to Trixie that reveals the intricacies of their relationship. In other hands, Ian McShane's Swearengen would just be evil rather than a distinctive mode of frontier ethicist and world builder. In any case, the HBO of old rarely offered exposition. To watch those shows, you had to be engaged. And, in todays frantic world, we often just want to tune out, not tune in. </p><p>And so I find HBO's surrender to the will of disposable TV, and its entire business model, upsetting. The shift in logos says it all. The old logo and slogan promised something different, a rupture and reinvention of the very medium itself. The new one just throws colored glitter in our faces. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK0d4F9fP-Uawy1yxrdp_eV7vX3Ot4-GURGfFLRfchVYukBnCxzpgXj1AH1BpqUamnh-FsA2VIQ0-zTYe3LFBMjG1meloUxYfLwTVsgzY5gwXzGxeLYbwcjQyZ92Ifq4vmNndZwSqxjF0/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="254" data-original-width="494" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK0d4F9fP-Uawy1yxrdp_eV7vX3Ot4-GURGfFLRfchVYukBnCxzpgXj1AH1BpqUamnh-FsA2VIQ0-zTYe3LFBMjG1meloUxYfLwTVsgzY5gwXzGxeLYbwcjQyZ92Ifq4vmNndZwSqxjF0/w465-h240/image.png" width="465" /></a></div></div><br /><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="355" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rXbUm9ddaZk" width="493" youtube-src-id="rXbUm9ddaZk"></iframe></div>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-83491265055481331362021-02-23T18:02:00.000-08:002021-02-23T18:02:22.652-08:00Yes. This. Again!, or Art is the Repetition of Limits which is Love<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7PUu4oYjSiQ7fyXAMfPVFhJawplg3r-jm9M5PdY3E13g21BEIaE8LD1E4JmhffKR1ft63W6ZmdM9YqvMZwD5l_6n7zQb_V16MhhAMGN_4vvYrO28svgutzzJu6sTZ8el6jmVQgW3aSOY/s2048/IMG_1252.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" height="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7PUu4oYjSiQ7fyXAMfPVFhJawplg3r-jm9M5PdY3E13g21BEIaE8LD1E4JmhffKR1ft63W6ZmdM9YqvMZwD5l_6n7zQb_V16MhhAMGN_4vvYrO28svgutzzJu6sTZ8el6jmVQgW3aSOY/w504-h284/IMG_1252.jpeg" width="504" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Despite playing the guitar for 35 years, I am not a musician. I'm stymied by too many possibilities. <br />A musician — an artist — sees limits within that infinite field. </span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>I've been playing guitar since I was 16. I feel like every guy my age, more or less, plays the guitar. What happened to that? Learning the guitar took time: fingers need to be trained to make those chords. And it hurts having skinny steel string dig into your fingertips! How do the kids spend their time now? I suppose they screw around on Logic creating beats. This is not a judgement; it's just an observation. </p><p>Anyway, for the most part, I am a terrible guitar player. I can play chords and some scales and, every now and again, I'm inspired to craft a little something. But it doesn't flow out of me the way it does, say, Paul McCartney or Rob Crow — folks who write song and after song as if they had no choice. It doesn't flow out of me like it does for my friend Brian who crafts and lusciously produces ditties across a breadth of styles in his basement studio — all amidst his work and familial duties, no less. These folks think through the world in terms of music. When they look over the landscape of life, they see music, think music, all the shapes and sounds and speeds and possibilities and, from it all, say: <i>Ah, this</i>. </p><p>Me, I don't think in terms of music. When I pick up my guitar, I don't see a way <i>through </i>or <i>of </i>or <i>with</i> the world. I see ghosts, cliché, Jimi and Stephen Stills and Black Francis. Which is to say, I see what's been; I don't see what could be. I don't think the world in terms of music, as these units of vibration, rhythm, and affective resonance. When I <i>listen </i>to music, I relentlessly seek new approaches to life and sound that are interesting. But when I sit down <i>to play,</i> I look in the rear view mirror. </p><p>As I pick up my guitar, I rarely have a vision of what I want from the instrument, the kinds of sounds I want to make, the moods I want to conjure. I noodle and hope something will come, a child-maniac in a sandbox hurling sand every which way because it feels great and because that's the only way I know how to interact with this music and its infinite possibilities. I'm not sure how to shape it, work with it, create new worlds with it. All I know is this sand feels really good running through my fingers. So I keep doing it.</p><p>If and when a shape does actually emerge from this play — a lick, a riff, a sonic shape that has mood, texture, and form — I am hard pressed to repeat it. It comes — and then goes even more readily. I have trouble corralling it into a <i>thing,</i> a form of life, of meaning, a discrete unit of affect and vibration. I have trouble finding its internal mechanics, the thing that drives it, animates it, its immanent logic. And so it dissipates, so many grains of sand through my fingers. I can't play it again to give it form: to birth it. </p><p><b>All forms — human bodies, animal bodies, gnats, rocks, gadgets, rivers, molecules and medicines, ideas, sentences, <i>anything </i>that coheres into something, whether visible or invisible — all forms are animated by the miraculous operation of repetition.</b> (R<span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;">epetition is not a force but is usually a conjunction of myriad forces</span> — gravity, momentum, desire.) That is precisely what a form is (or rather how a form <i>becomes</i>): it's these limits <i>again and again</i>. If you don't repeat its limits, it no longer exists as it; it's now something else. <span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;">Repetition animates and propels a form to maintain itself as a form and not, say, dissipate into a glorious cosmic fireworks like Oogway upon death.</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"> Repetition is the operation that transforms a willy-nilly assemblage into <i>this</i>.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="318" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/m-3OztBnuaM" width="595" youtube-src-id="m-3OztBnuaM"></iframe></div><p>There are all kinds of repetition. Memory, for instance, is the repetition of forms in what seems to be a different form but is nonetheless constitutive of that form (which lets us know that a form has all kinds of modes and limits; when you repeat as my memory, you are a gossamer image; indeed, all forms are images of some sort — Henri Bergson says matter = image — so your repetition as my memory is a mode of the image that is you. The reproduction of images is not a recent invention but is the very stuff of existence). A thing may not exist materially anymore but it persists in the repetition of itself in and with other bodies — recollections, photographs, scars, erosion. <b>In the act of living, w</b><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;"><b>e become agents of repetition of other forms. </b>Sometimes, a repetition introduces such a radical mutation that it becomes a new form — from fish to mammal. This is the great game of telephone, the play of memetics, that <i>is</i> life and its relentless becoming. Isn't this the basis of Darwin's evolution, after all — a repetition of forms with difference?</span></p><p>(A word or ten on memory as repetition....Memory is a form of possible new limits being introduced into our ways of going. An asteroid hits a mountain and now that mountain is mountain with crater (as asteroid repeats as crater). If the asteroid were bigger, it might decimate that mountain, transforming it from mountain to crater, making it mountain no more as its limits no longer exist. We are all mountains with craters. And sometimes, after the asteroid hits, we're just crater — or something else entirely.)</p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-size-adjust: auto;">As is the way of repetition, evolution is the perpetual introduction of difference of the form — humans get a thumb, a big brain, incorporate the virus of language. The repetition of a form <i>is </i>the introduction of difference (which, as our asteroid taught us, may eradicate the form). Every time Bob Dylan performs "Isis," it's different. If it were the same every time, it wouldn't be repetition: it would be a copy. He could just play the album. As repetition is an operation of bodies in the word, and as body in the world is in flux, repetition is an act of form maintaining its form as it changes. All forms inevitably take on new tics, new materials, new modes — mountains erode, people age. Think of a yourself: you are you over time, sure, but this you is always different. If the difference is so great as to erase your existing limits, you are either dead or born again as a new form. </span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="368" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Cii3aF2a8oE" width="569" youtube-src-id="Cii3aF2a8oE"></iframe></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/INilAY6aJTc" width="570" youtube-src-id="INilAY6aJTc"></iframe></div><p>I suppose a form <i>could </i>be bound by something external such as a soul or Platonic Form, a non-material force that animates this mortal coil but is not <i>of </i>it. In this case, a form is not bound by repetition but by a metaphysic — that is, the thing that makes me me and not, say, an assortment of limbs, veins, and personality tics is my soul. And this soul is not of this world but is divine, external to the particular form of me. One clear advantage of this is that it means that the thing that binds this all together doesn't die when I die — so this form that is me <i>could</i> exist again. </p><p></p><p>But such an architecture of limits creates a split personality. or even schizophrenia, in which I am bound by something that may very well have motives at odds with my experiences, my pleasures, my desires, my very body. Isn't this the cruelty we portray in our movies as the Church or Family forbids, say, a homosexual romance leaving our horny hero in a state of self loathing? After all, who knows the will of this soul (if it's not of me)? Priests? The government? By saying I am bound by a soul external to me, we invite some uncomfortable politics.</p><p>In any case, to repeat something is to say <i>Yes </i>to this and this and <i>No</i> to all that. Repetition is the movement of a form, an act of discernment and selection, as it moves through the world. If I eat granola every morning for breakfast, I am saying <i>Yes</i> to granola and <i>No</i> to croissants, eggs, toast, not to mention fillet mignon, chocolate mousse, dumplings, burritos, and fasting. So it is with art: a musician plays these notes and not those; a painter affirms these shapes and not those; a writer affirms these words, tone, and rhythm and not those. Creation is the affirmation of limits. A heralding of <i>this — </i>and the love to repeat it. </p><p>When musicians find something they want to play again, what is that other than radical affirmation, a Yes saying to a form, a declaration of love? <i>This! I like it so much I'm going to play it again!</i> A musician summons a form into the world — a moving form, of course, but that's redundant as everything is always already moving — and, in playing it again, affirms and creates it. <i>Here. This. Hear this.</i></p><p>What is that other than love? Ok, sometimes is compulsion, a weird tic or hiccup. When I pick up my guitar, I inevitably play one of a very small set of licks. It doesn't feel like love as much as it feels like, well, a hiccup — an involuntary repetition that devolves into a copy.</p><p>So while not all repetition is love, all love is repetition. Repetition is the heart of love: It says <i>Yes to this...over and over, as time moves and things change...yes...yes to infinity </i>(or until exhaustion, distaste, or a change in circumstance). In the second volume of <b>Either/Or</b>, the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkeegard, assumes the voice of a married judge writing a letter to a young aesthete who beds a series of women. The demand of marriage, this judge argues, is to find the erotic in one's spouse every day — to find it again, anew, each day — rather than finding the new in a different person every day. For Kierkegaard's judge, love — or at least an erotic marriage — lives and dies in the act of repetition. Love is the affirmation of <i>this</i> person, <i>these</i> limits, <i>this </i>way of going. </p><p>Love, like repetition, is not general. It is particular: I love <i>this —</i> this person, this tequila, this film. When a musician repeats a line, creates a melody, forges a structured "piece of music," they are not saying <i>Yes</i> to all music, all sound, all melodies, all notes, all harmonies. In repeating this form, they are saying <i>No</i> to most of the world — not as Nay sayers <i>per se</i> but as someone who only has eyes for <i>this.</i> </p><p>When I try to write a song, I am immediately and continuously overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of possibilities. Have you ever used a program like GarageBand or Logic? You can choose one of their thousands of beats, use their tools to create your own, or upload an existing beat from elsewhere. How in the world am I suppose to choose? Do I just go with a simple rock 4/4 (which is never a simple decision as there are many simple rock 4/4 beats)? Or do I want something more trip hoppy? Or punk? Or disco? Laid back and super chill? A waltz? A march? Do I speed up the time or slow it down? And that's just for selecting a beat! I haven't even got to writing the damn song with its infinite sprawl of possibility. </p><p>When I sit down in front of the blank page of a GarageBand file, I am stymied. I don't see possibilities; I don't see shapes or ideas. I just see choices, too many choices, infinite choices. I may goof around and stumble on a shape I like and will stick with it because, well, what else am I gonna do? And it's fun to stumble on a form and then try to repeat it, to stick to its internal logic, its limits, what it can become, how it goes in the world.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="376" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aAjC2L4hKBM" width="553" youtube-src-id="aAjC2L4hKBM"></iframe></div><br /><p>When a musician sits down in front of the same screen, they see forms. Rather than infinite possibilities, they see <i>these</i> possibilities, not the sublimity of <i>all</i> possibilities. No doubt, most musicians most of the time don't know the exact form of the song-to-be. They, too, have to negotiate a morass of possible shapes, moods, and ideas — and these may very well change. "Sympathy for the Devil" started as a folk song. But musicians don't see the possibilities as sublime, as too much: they see what they need to see, even when unsure, even when grasping. Where I consider my musical instruments and see unbound possibilities devoid of discretion, they see limits everywhere — grooves and such. I see every possible way of going. They see different ways of going. </p><p><b>No doubt, many aspiring musicians only see a small set of old ways of going. They can <i>copy</i> a lick, copy a song, but they can't <i>repeat</i> it. </b>To copy is to see the traits and try to replicate them — bend the note here just like Jimi did, pull back like Jimi did. To repeat is to be of the form itself. To dwell, to live through, its internal mechanics. It's not to play act but to become that form. As my basement studio musician friend, Brian, argues Jimi Hendrix doesn't even play an instrument per se. He is the instrument; he becomes guitar or, rather, with a guitar Hendrix becomes pure expression, an unmediated event. To copy is to play an instrument, to play a song. To repeat is to birth a form, to animate the emergence of life itself. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="331" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/E2aQ4gVsSL8" width="601" youtube-src-id="E2aQ4gVsSL8"></iframe></div><br /><p>I believe many people experience this sublimity when they sit down to write. The blank page stops them in their tracks in its infinite possibilities. How in the world to begin? That white blank page creates a kind of snow blindness — all the different ways to begin, all the ways to construct a sentence, all the voices and tones one can take at once. How to choose which is right or best? Many, faced with such a daunting choice, revert to cliché. I taught critical writing at UC Berkeley for a decade and it was conspicuous: students would try to sound erudite, copying a mode of expression rather than repeating it. ("Man has long pondered the question of truth" was a common opening line for papers on Nietzsche.)</p><p>I've been writing concertedly for a long time now; 35 years which, oddly enough, is the same amount of time I've been playing guitar. Except when I sit down in front of a blank word processing doc, I don't see infinite possibilities. I see <i>many</i> possibilities, many ways in, many ways through but, no matter what, I see ways. I see forms, trajectories. I see limits. </p><p>Of course, once into the piece of writing, these limits may very well change — open, close, morph, shift direction. But I never find myself blinded by the abundance of it all. I am always choosing from among forms and modes of combination. Like the musician working in GarageBand, I see different ways of going that may change but are rarely washed out by the quantitative abundance of options. </p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>An artist, then, is not one who sees infinite possibilities. On the contrary, an artist sees limits. But despite the familiar way we think of limits, these limits are not constraining. Rather, these limits are the very creation of the world, of a new form, a new way of going, a creation born of love. </b></span></p><p>In this sense, an artist does see infinite possibility — but the infinite possibility of new forms to exist in general. When artists see the world, they don't assume they're stuck with what is; they assume new forms are always possible. That is precisely what an artist is: a creator of novel forms. But just as they see infinite possibility of new forms in general, they see limits as they create these new forms. Amid the abundant fertility of the world, they see limits everywhere — all these ways of going, all these new forms that can grow, mutate, flourish. </p><p>When I taught critical writing to undergrads, I never gave them a blank page and told them to write. That would be absurd. To paraphrase the German philosopher Husserl's claim about consciousness, writing is always writing <i>of </i>something. Even when we did free writing — five minutes without picking their pens up from the page — I provided a prompt, a leaping off point, something to reckon, even if they demolished that prompt. All creation comes from limits. Indeed, to create is to limit. Just as nothing comes from nothing, nothing comes from everything. Something comes from this. </p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Artists create and, in repetition, affirm limits. They repeat logics and operations that forge and extend these limits, these forms of life. And what is that other than love — a wild unabashed scream of <i>Yes! This! Again!</i></b></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="364" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/n49ucyyTB34" width="573" youtube-src-id="n49ucyyTB34"></iframe></div><br /><i><br /></i><p></p>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-64517415668170923412021-01-05T09:33:00.000-08:002021-01-05T09:33:05.615-08:00Saved by Cinema: On the Kino-Eye of Ryland Walker Knight's "I Wish You Would"<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO-OsqcGDEoslunAOYnRChGleqAYeuzqVIzU2q-d6X2bvJ2N46_eeHaqySFD3d8Nfndn9-iepnkcOMWUt6OUOjVsxwBQxePKIyY1IGBOD-KWIxIzipZJvjH5nlEQrWcqcjBNxlgj6iFOs/s1296/MV5BN2I4NTUwY2MtZmU4My00MmJkLTkzMjEtNGIyNzU0MzJjOTMxXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTU1NjM5NTI%2540._V1_.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1296" data-original-width="864" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO-OsqcGDEoslunAOYnRChGleqAYeuzqVIzU2q-d6X2bvJ2N46_eeHaqySFD3d8Nfndn9-iepnkcOMWUt6OUOjVsxwBQxePKIyY1IGBOD-KWIxIzipZJvjH5nlEQrWcqcjBNxlgj6iFOs/w266-h400/MV5BN2I4NTUwY2MtZmU4My00MmJkLTkzMjEtNGIyNzU0MzJjOTMxXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTU1NjM5NTI%2540._V1_.jpg" width="266" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Watch the film here > https://vimeo.com/358238055</td></tr></tbody></table><p>One of my favorite sequences in "I Wish You Would," Ryland Walker Knight's short(ish) new and deeply affective film, finds the camera following the lead character, Stanley, as he walks down an Oakland street drinking a case of Pabst. The camera moves with him as if it's there with him — as if, perhaps, we're there with him. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzmfxJKnNmOJegIFvQAJOYx9TL8ZeRQl5qpG1RtZ3eLB6GFciwt9wY7JqBOdenC6GY3DIbhKFN_60sNN2Xa6quMc8Znabd6Bea_884KudlJitXIkTQehOtyrO_AxFZZduHjSWRm7qTBO0/s1678/Screen+Shot+2020-12-22+at+4.32.55+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="708" data-original-width="1678" height="169" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzmfxJKnNmOJegIFvQAJOYx9TL8ZeRQl5qpG1RtZ3eLB6GFciwt9wY7JqBOdenC6GY3DIbhKFN_60sNN2Xa6quMc8Znabd6Bea_884KudlJitXIkTQehOtyrO_AxFZZduHjSWRm7qTBO0/w400-h169/Screen+Shot+2020-12-22+at+4.32.55+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhulsjiXvmwK_mI8ikLcCqR53OzmWtkB62PHH_xy1wykNN4b2GSrs_Kv0zJhsW9hk_klNGH6NPMfXt-U9Ny5X0zuAvfZgFDK7GPSrLC0SZKrkRfjWWgJMI4h8if94IC6jg_7qiqnLgHfuI/s1679/Screen+Shot+2020-12-22+at+4.33.53+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="706" data-original-width="1679" height="169" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhulsjiXvmwK_mI8ikLcCqR53OzmWtkB62PHH_xy1wykNN4b2GSrs_Kv0zJhsW9hk_klNGH6NPMfXt-U9Ny5X0zuAvfZgFDK7GPSrLC0SZKrkRfjWWgJMI4h8if94IC6jg_7qiqnLgHfuI/w400-h169/Screen+Shot+2020-12-22+at+4.33.53+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>But despite the camera keeping its steady pace, Stanley falls out of frame. Such is the story of this beautiful, affective film: Stanley has fallen out of the frame of the social having had some kind of psychotic episode that landed him in a mandatory institutional hold. As he's released from his stay, he tries to re-enter the frame of his life. The film tracks his attempts and, alas, failures.</div><div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOom0Oc2kSNdozL9Y_Ww25esxChg9qwdYYHq_CnhQlKRJzN7dtNRh6eyMNE8R8SxosiuX7EpK2H6HBu5Q7oSEYvtwPJwFOhYhwxkBUxI3DOjr5CjB9-KA5lrbcBPITFF614XPeqhd2TEE/s1676/Screen+Shot+2020-12-22+at+4.34.04+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="707" data-original-width="1676" height="169" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOom0Oc2kSNdozL9Y_Ww25esxChg9qwdYYHq_CnhQlKRJzN7dtNRh6eyMNE8R8SxosiuX7EpK2H6HBu5Q7oSEYvtwPJwFOhYhwxkBUxI3DOjr5CjB9-KA5lrbcBPITFF614XPeqhd2TEE/w400-h169/Screen+Shot+2020-12-22+at+4.34.04+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhniRDjiWI7TkKNBN41jJV6yATH0b7AkQvoYl5NvLrRZ50-zduDTgfe04s-vi7YXQQV_0cXECho2oXabN_ytSvnuK4jdt8tUAtnIWaYHtV_HURTGNF5YeFfZQr_sdhUjr37oB3-9I5X0pU/s1680/Screen+Shot+2020-12-22+at+4.34.17+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="707" data-original-width="1680" height="169" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhniRDjiWI7TkKNBN41jJV6yATH0b7AkQvoYl5NvLrRZ50-zduDTgfe04s-vi7YXQQV_0cXECho2oXabN_ytSvnuK4jdt8tUAtnIWaYHtV_HURTGNF5YeFfZQr_sdhUjr37oB3-9I5X0pU/w400-h169/Screen+Shot+2020-12-22+at+4.34.17+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>In this sequence, the camera carries on, keeping its pace, making no effort whatsoever to find our leading man. He may be the focus of the film but the camera has a will and way of its own. Soon, Stanley renters the frame and, once again, the camera is tracking with him. At first, I wrote "tracking him" but that's not quite right: he and the camera have their respective paces which mostly coincide — the camera is tracking <i>with</i> him.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC1heZBah9WqHxzoLB1YBLU6q8Wb-Pp6Y7_22FvOpO9pswxrPlPaDpta9_ZQWTBYnds3EdK6pHz6mYRwZy_fT2ckMPq-38LgXGOtEMh9txYev__obm_811RKRuXi0QhIvFwCx0Dca1G5E/s1681/Screen+Shot+2020-12-22+at+4.35.04+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="709" data-original-width="1681" height="169" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC1heZBah9WqHxzoLB1YBLU6q8Wb-Pp6Y7_22FvOpO9pswxrPlPaDpta9_ZQWTBYnds3EdK6pHz6mYRwZy_fT2ckMPq-38LgXGOtEMh9txYev__obm_811RKRuXi0QhIvFwCx0Dca1G5E/w400-h169/Screen+Shot+2020-12-22+at+4.35.04+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDfqfCOnyl8lWOvm5L7HeJveZyXzkyE1gp5_F0QMVS80bHldBb0q6Cdv1dG4976pf3oOg_jRlfinY6UL5q49u_BjQTJr4cymBfR0tXAfYkVc_jrerAkJTy5MoE4-hem96fbg21LKLoUsQ/s1672/Screen+Shot+2020-12-22+at+4.35.29+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="707" data-original-width="1672" height="169" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDfqfCOnyl8lWOvm5L7HeJveZyXzkyE1gp5_F0QMVS80bHldBb0q6Cdv1dG4976pf3oOg_jRlfinY6UL5q49u_BjQTJr4cymBfR0tXAfYkVc_jrerAkJTy5MoE4-hem96fbg21LKLoUsQ/w400-h169/Screen+Shot+2020-12-22+at+4.35.29+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>And even when the camera is with Stanley, it sees as it sees, light saturating the image, as if the camera is as interested in the sun as it is in Stanley. Such is Stanley: he is alienated from his friends, from what seems to be his girlfriend, from his home (he's been locked out), from himself, and even seemingly from the camera telling his tale. </p><p>But this camera that can't quite keep him its sights, that blends him with the sun, may very well be the very thing that sees him best and binds him to the world — perhaps not the social world but to the world in the ultimate sense: to the universe, the cosmos. </p><p>When the film opens, the screen is black as we hear what sounds like someone trying to get comfortable in their seat and not succeeding. The first voice we hear reinforces this initial impression: "To begin," says a woman's voice, "just get comfortable." But that is the one thing Stanley can't seem to do — not here, for sure, and not throughout the series of encounters that define the film. </p><p>"I want you to close your eyes," she continues and, with that, the black screen goes light and we see Stanley, in and out of blur, negotiating trees and we can't tell: Is he hunter or hunted? In any case, he's not settled. This is not him at home in nature. The screen then turns a reddish orange as if we're looking at the cellular structure of life itself before the camera pans back to reveal it's a flower's pistil — this seething, surging virility of life and a far cry from Stanley at the moment. But the camera is shaky. Like Stanley, we're unsure and yet can see the beauty of life, if only we could hold it in our gaze. </p><p>Stanley, we'll learn, is never at home. After being released from an institution, presumably for a psychiatric episode, he returns to his apartment to find he's been locked out, a note attached to his padlocked door reads, "I know you're sick, but you violated our agreement." </p><p>Of course he has. Stanley has no real connection to the social world, to friends and family, to the order of things. When he is being released from the clinic, he's handed his phone and immediately tries to make connection and, as he listens to a voicemail from a woman who sounds concerned but distant, the nurse asks, "You got someone coming to pick you up, hun?" That is the question for Stanley that the film at once asks and answers with a decided <i>No</i>, at least not in any any way that matters.</p><p>We learn that something happened, some kind of break, that ended with Stanley being arrested and institutionalized. In what may be flashbacks or memories, we see him running frantically towards water — the Bay or lake — where he strips to his underwear and looks about madly, lost. This is not a maniacal episode in which he's too certain of himself. This is a break, a loss of identity, of that scaffold that lets us carry on with our lives.</p><p>His return to the social upon his release doesn't fare well. The man who does indeed pick him up — a former teacher? an uncle? — is concerned but detached. "Do nothing," he tells Stanley before driving off. After Stanley enters his apartment to find his room padlocked, he goes to a café where what seems to be his girlfriend works. She, too, is concerned — but annoyed above all. Their connection is tenuous at best. Utterly at a lost amid the social, Stanley lunges over the counter for a kiss. She is horrified. "Oh god, Stan....no...Jesus...no. What was that?" "I don't know," he replies. </p><p>His lack of social connection is devastating. All Stanley wants is connection. To feel at home. But everywhere he turns, he's met with the ornaments of care, with frustration, with cliché. He can't get what he wants. And he doesn't seem capable of asking for it. The title resounds in this absence: I wish you would love me, kiss me, hold me, care for me.</p><p>Walking from a cemetery after drinking his Pabst, he finally has an encounter that feels real: he's mugged at gun point. After the mugger takes his phone — Stanley's last vestige of connection — the mugger demands Stanley's wallet. Which, alas, he doesn't have. This provokes the mugger and, in turn, Stanley grabs the gun and puts it to his forehead, muttering with intensity, "I wish you would." That is all he can ask for: death.</p><p>After having his phone stolen, he proceeds to Oakland's great Grand Lake Cinema. His friend, the manager, greets him — but, once again, Stanley meets nothing but condescension, the facade of care. "You been drinking?" his supposed friend asks smelling the beer on Stanley, nothing but judgement in his voice. Stanley tells him he's been robbed. Call the police, his friend tells him. Why? wonders Stanley. His friend responds as if Stanley's an idiot, "To catch the person who robbed you. That's what cops do. They catch people who commit crimes." </p><p>This long exchange with the theater manager is a difficult scene to watch. The gap between these two friends is infinite and they both know it. But what makes it worse is the manager plays friend to a <i>t</i> — except he won't let Stanley stay with him. He offers platitudes instead. "You can't drink," he tells Stanley. "Has she [your therapist] said anything about taking it one day at a time?" To which Stanley replies, "They all do." Cliché is not care. Cliché, as Stanley knows too well, is a living death.</p><p>But the manager does unwittingly provide Stanley the help he need: he lets him into an auditorium to watch a film. We don't learn which one because it doesn't matter. What matters is cinema which is premised on being alone in the dark in order to be fully sated. </p><p>This is Stanley's salvation. The camera stays on him as he watches the unnamed film and, for the first and only time, we see him relax, smile, breathe. It made me think of "Hannah and Her Sisters" when Woody Allen, after his botched suicide attempt, wanders the streets of New York until he finds himself in a movie theater watching the Marx Brothers and, watching the absurdity on screen, finds peace.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/j6qjibwpEzM" width="560" youtube-src-id="j6qjibwpEzM"></iframe></div><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">But, for Stanley, it's not what's on screen that matters: it's the screen itself. It's cinema itself. It's cinema seeing; it's kino-eye. A camera is beautifully, refreshingly stupid. It offers a seeing and act of being seen that is infinitely generous, free of any judgement or even the possibility of judgement. Where Stanley's friends see and judge in the same gesture, the camera only sees — and lets you see in your solitude. In fact, it's a very condition of cinema: solitude and darkness. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Through the film, we see Stanley meditate. These meditations are not the stillness we associate with meditation. For Stanley, meditation is a movie. But not a narrative movie; not a story. His meditations are films of the kino-eye — no judgement, no categorization, just a wash of affect, ambience, even if there's dread involved now and again. For Stanley, salvation is not through other people. It's through cinema; it's through a seeing that is free of what Nietzsche would call the all too human. This is salvation through kino-eye, through cinema-seeing. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxrI_g3Oox_baWvsRbpxUufNwrXiUz8pXl_geG6yOANQmc635yNLeKHvdD-xYeETs0m5-PxkMH-Ax_wNkJON-BAc-dGIQEBVD5UGDqM1ZIDQP2Sn5s11_qL8pwvWmKJ5Slt1ywZ2mUqzo/s970/Screen+Shot+2020-12-24+at+2.58.15+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="708" data-original-width="970" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxrI_g3Oox_baWvsRbpxUufNwrXiUz8pXl_geG6yOANQmc635yNLeKHvdD-xYeETs0m5-PxkMH-Ax_wNkJON-BAc-dGIQEBVD5UGDqM1ZIDQP2Sn5s11_qL8pwvWmKJ5Slt1ywZ2mUqzo/s320/Screen+Shot+2020-12-24+at+2.58.15+PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Plu51ChrlKRfCa0y6glwQj-OZMo-N4I2kLKs9jYJ6OwYrAgU13A2zio5iy-3KwsUOW4DhyphenhyphenDlmUe_GpBPvGmKJ8EkKak0InxxO85_nmJGc5SANSOR7Jps_9ppP6ANexp-IJd9DzaOXBg/s970/Screen+Shot+2020-12-24+at+2.57.49+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="681" data-original-width="970" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Plu51ChrlKRfCa0y6glwQj-OZMo-N4I2kLKs9jYJ6OwYrAgU13A2zio5iy-3KwsUOW4DhyphenhyphenDlmUe_GpBPvGmKJ8EkKak0InxxO85_nmJGc5SANSOR7Jps_9ppP6ANexp-IJd9DzaOXBg/s320/Screen+Shot+2020-12-24+at+2.57.49+PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFrEBI5o-msNDMtjQ5dwieE9MG72zEpQYD8hdjC19ZMX-0ZyvxKs3PKMF4uCMsZcVD-dceFWU5S2rcpNY2Dx3kT55wpFaanXiRemMLR47q0jFflW9d1FFerghLATDW5U7CWcwR8RN25Og/s1670/Screen+Shot+2020-12-24+at+2.58.32+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="731" data-original-width="1670" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFrEBI5o-msNDMtjQ5dwieE9MG72zEpQYD8hdjC19ZMX-0ZyvxKs3PKMF4uCMsZcVD-dceFWU5S2rcpNY2Dx3kT55wpFaanXiRemMLR47q0jFflW9d1FFerghLATDW5U7CWcwR8RN25Og/s320/Screen+Shot+2020-12-24+at+2.58.32+PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><p>"I Wish You Would" is a beautiful, moving film of alienation made by a noted film writer turned filmmaker. It made me think of Barry Jenkins' "Moonlight" — Barry happens to be a producer of "I Wish You Would" — and its portrayal of vulnerability. And this film, if nothing else, is a portrait of vulnerability. But whereas the character in "Moonlight" is saved by the touch of another man, Stanley is saved by cinema — by a camera that doesn't mind if he drifts out of frame, a camera that's always on and welcomes him back just as he is, drunk and lost or not. </p><p>And such, precisely, is this film: it's a performative salvation. Here, and perhaps here alone, Stanley is loved by a camera that, even if he drifts out of frame, will welcome him back, no questions asked. And even bathe him in sunlight.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVFq7-9WRjHF2Oe9-Qg837QnSJt7U0R2i3xnRoo3BBRlsJT722d0CLtmGfnX8GfSkKfGOyDvQqmZcmIHu5_1moMeme5RvCTOQ29DATgTrcXBWjoi9zSpy0y3W32y_jRCaZx2N9ceJuv00/s1675/Screen+Shot+2020-12-22+at+5.12.36+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="704" data-original-width="1675" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVFq7-9WRjHF2Oe9-Qg837QnSJt7U0R2i3xnRoo3BBRlsJT722d0CLtmGfnX8GfSkKfGOyDvQqmZcmIHu5_1moMeme5RvCTOQ29DATgTrcXBWjoi9zSpy0y3W32y_jRCaZx2N9ceJuv00/w499-h209/Screen+Shot+2020-12-22+at+5.12.36+PM.png" width="499" /></a></div>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-53738965651268370922020-12-27T19:22:00.001-08:002020-12-30T13:27:26.520-08:00Watching "The Wire" Again and Again and Again, or The Many Modes of Repetition<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkJm7R98sgPa-Y4T9e76ATgqDcNZAIY2FezNHJZHwHEftJvl4tACj-RFCdNQmp1sjuRlIL3mhvAG3gy1qmqu90gNmO7buytRQ98S6kISR6sf5Gborlv0haHeqNrXG9vgafJjtBabmsnKU/s667/thewirestringer.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="667" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkJm7R98sgPa-Y4T9e76ATgqDcNZAIY2FezNHJZHwHEftJvl4tACj-RFCdNQmp1sjuRlIL3mhvAG3gy1qmqu90gNmO7buytRQ98S6kISR6sf5Gborlv0haHeqNrXG9vgafJjtBabmsnKU/w509-h286/thewirestringer.jpg" width="509" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small; text-align: left;">I've seen "The Wire" at least two dozen times. Why? I'll let Søren Kierkegaard answer: "Just as [the Greeks] taught that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is repetition."</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>I'm watching "The Wire" these days. I've watched it many, many times before; I wouldn't be surprised to learn I've seen it 25 or more times. People sometimes make fun of me for it. But what, precisely, are they making fun of? And why <i>do</i> I watch it over and over? Well, for that matter, why do I — why do we, why does anyone — do anything again? </div><div><br /></div><div>There are many reasons, of course. But, for now, I'll try to focus on TV shows in general and "The Wire" in particular. </div><div><br /></div><div>I believe some people find it odd that I watch something over and over because, whether they know it or not, they somehow believe TV shows are primarily for the dispensation of information. Once you know if Ross and Rachel get together or if John McClane gets out this pickle, the show is done. Used up. This is our culture's obsession with "spoiler alerts": we believe that the show — or movie or novel — is telling us something and, once we know, its job is over. So why watch it again? </div><div><br /></div><div>But that's obviously absurd. Art is not the dispensation of information. Sure, some stories might turn on revelation. But the best stories are concerned with <i>how </i>events affect people and their relationships, not <i>what </i>happens. This doesn't mean there's no suspense. It means that revelation per se is not the reason we engage. Personally, I never care how something turns out; you can't spoil anything for me. The art is in the going. I think of John Cassavetes' achingly beautiful, "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie." <i>The title tells us what happens. </i>The film lives in the <i>how </i>— and what a <i>how </i>it is!</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrrfx2GjBC4Qbj2XXIyxIq_kQUyK3ywhb90Uii5f_UNvpx47phLbp7kMwqbxVf5dXrOS5sY1dbiZ_r60xrKyDmqs_m9MgxB0qjyt0FFbzwFMcB9oK1tW6tS-9U3RkxFAGdQkSW8I9eHHk/s726/killingbookie.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="388" data-original-width="726" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrrfx2GjBC4Qbj2XXIyxIq_kQUyK3ywhb90Uii5f_UNvpx47phLbp7kMwqbxVf5dXrOS5sY1dbiZ_r60xrKyDmqs_m9MgxB0qjyt0FFbzwFMcB9oK1tW6tS-9U3RkxFAGdQkSW8I9eHHk/w497-h266/killingbookie.jpg" width="497" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The title of the film, "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie," is a "spoiler alert." The film is not <i>the what </i>of the plot but <i>the how</i> of an experience — for both characters and viewers. I mean, c'mon, look at that shot! </span></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>Now consider sports for a moment. Is each game the same thing over and over? Or is each game different, a reckoning of life, each game something new? Why play or watch a game again? Because life seethes in this <i>again</i>. In fact, if there were only one baseball game ever, it would be absurd — not to mention boring <i>af,</i> as the kids say. Sports get their power, especially baseball, in that again — and again and again. It gets more interesting the more it's repeated. Sure, you say, but each baseball game is actually different — unlike "The Wire" which stays the same. Fair enough. But sports nevertheless reveal one mode of repetition, namely, the emergence of patterns — such as consistency as signs of mastery, intelligence, skill, suckiness.</div><div><br /></div><div>So let's take a painting, instead. You don't see a painting once and assume it's "done," do you? No doubt, we wish some art could be done after we've seen it. But not art we love. It's there to be seen over and over; we even seek out this repetition, hanging it on our walls. We want the experience of beholding that art, the way it works us over (to borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan), not the information it provides. So why isn't a TV show the same? "The Wire" is an <i>experience</i>, not a series of facts to be known. I watch "The Wire" over and over for the same reason people look at the same painting over and over — or, for that matter, have sex over and over: it feels good. It's an expression of love. </div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzMHJWU1tBfAmBjJFrpu6NyoR650Ssmb81X9m-GMvWNxMwJlsqxloaaqhTB6IeVQgmuc6lNLH_-7f_7raMpGOMP4WJQ13LpUsb6Vqx99bkZ6bj3UWMPc1uEOdDY83-08yBbYP9X-FnTl8/s1024/bacon.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="418" data-original-width="1024" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzMHJWU1tBfAmBjJFrpu6NyoR650Ssmb81X9m-GMvWNxMwJlsqxloaaqhTB6IeVQgmuc6lNLH_-7f_7raMpGOMP4WJQ13LpUsb6Vqx99bkZ6bj3UWMPc1uEOdDY83-08yBbYP9X-FnTl8/w513-h210/bacon.jpg" width="513" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> I love looking Francis Bacon's paintings more than once, more than twice, more than a dozen times. And yet I don't want to have this hanging above my bed. It's too intense for my everyday living. Every will to "again" is different and depends on the bodies involved. It's not a matter of again or not. It's a matter of how <i>this</i> happens again.</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>And yet that's not always as simple as it seems. For instance, I <i>love</i> many paintings by Francis Bacon. But I don't always want to see them; I certainly don't want to live with them hanging over my bed, down my hallways, in my living room. They're too intense for how I live day to day, for my affective metabolism, that is, for the affect I — as this person here — desire, consume, and distribute; I don't have the affective intestinal fortitude to look at a Bacon every day in my living room as I have snack or as I, say, lounge on my couch to watch "The Wire" for the 29th time. I look at these paintings again and again and linger with them each time so that I can experience, know, feel everything they offer — their affect, their feelings, their knowledge. And then I don't again for some time. </div><div><br /></div><div>But I <i>do </i>return to them — to feel and know things that can only come by experiencing those paintings again and again. If I knew I had only one viewing, my experience would be impossible to imagine. For that matter, art wouldn't even exist. Art only exists in repetition, in the fact that we know it will endure and be viewed multiple times. Sure, some works disrupt this reductive claim. Andy Goldsworthy, for instance, makes works that disappear with the elements, the tides or rains or river carrying his creations away. But he makes work that disappears with the elements again and again; indeed, his art emerges and lives in precisely this repetition. If he only made one work that vanished with the tides, it wouldn't be art (even if it might be artistic, beautiful, engaging). Style, which is to say life, only lives in repetition.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/S3YoIP2Itts" width="560" youtube-src-id="S3YoIP2Itts"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">.</span></div><div>Each thing — whether it's art, food, exercise, medicine, sex, or the gods — has <i>its</i> time. And that time may very well be one and done. Or it may happen over and over at a regular clip like a (healthy) heartbeat. Or it may be punctuated across time like a rock skipped across a pond. You may eat oatmeal every morning for years and only have chocolate mousse once every 27 months. But whatever its rhythm, repetition is built into the very structure of a thing's existence. Take us human beings before they've painted anything or played any games. We breathe — in, out, in, out. Our hearts beat their rhythms until they don't. We sleep and wake in cycles that accord with the day. Repetition is the very <i>modus operandi</i> of life. </div><div><br /></div><div>But, as Gilles Deleuze writes in the opening line of his devastatingly brilliant "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_and_Repetition#:~:text=Difference%20and%20Repetition%20(French%3A%20Diff%C3%A9rence,the%20French%20philosopher%20Gilles%20Deleuze.&text=Some%20commentators%20interpret%20the%20book,the%20viewpoint%20of%20genesis%20itself." target="_blank">Difference and Repetition</a>": "Repetition is not generality." (That's a line I didn't understand when I first read it 25 years ago; it's a line that I keep understanding differently every time I consider it.) There are as many modes of repetition as there are lives of people, rocks, insects, suns, smells, leaves, gins, experiences. It's not just that life lives in repetition; it's that living, in its many forms, is different articulations of repetition with different reasons we might do something again. </div><div><br /></div><div>We repeat to learn. I play guitar scales over and over to work on my precision, touch, finger strength. In fact, it's the only way to learn an instrument or, for that matter, to learn any new physical task. In this case, repetition is accumulation, a training of the body to be other than it is now. That is quite different than looking at a painting over and over again because it affords pleasure. In this case, repetition inaugurates a new mode of operation (which deftly debunks the understanding of repetition as a will to the same). </div><div><br /></div><div>I usually watch "The Wire" simply, or not so simply, for the pleasure. The dialogue is so good that, at such moments, it's like taking a shot of booze, a line of cocaine, smoking a cigarette, or doing a whippit: an explosive pleasure that has no goal other than its endurance here and now (until I do it again — and why wouldn't I? It feels good.)</div><div><br /></div><div>But I watch "The Wire" again in other ways, too. A few weeks ago, I was dealing with some intense family mayhem which left me sad, anxious, unsettled. I lay on the couch and just wanted something to settle me, calm me. And as my doctor refuses to write me a script for Xanax, I turned to TV. I wanted some experience to wash over me, take me in its warm embrace, something I knew I loved that would love me back. And so I turned to "The Wire" which has afforded me extraordinary and unhesitant pleasure for years. Repetition, then, can be the allure of familiarity amid a world that is relentless and difficult. </div><div><br /></div><div>This time watching "The Wire," however, I took another approach. This time I was curious about things I might have missed over the years. So I turned on closed captioning which shed light on so much of the background language, all the names of the drugs (<i>I got the icicles! I got that WMD! I got that Pandemic!</i>) and little turns of phrase I'd missed (and learned that Bunk's name is William; I only know that as Freamon says it once at the bar and I read it in the caption; I still rewound several times to confirm). In this case, repetition served to expand my appreciation of the show. This wasn't repetition as pleasure (even if pleasant) or as balm but as a mode of learning more. After all, the show is complex with elaborate language so there's a lot to miss the first 20-odd times. Once doesn't suffice.</div><div><br /></div><div>And then there's the fact that once the show is so familiar to me, I can assess it on other terms. That is, rather than just watching it for what I've missed or for its familiarity, I use this familiarity as a foundation that lets me analyze different aspects of the show I've not paid as much attention to. It's a compelling show; it's easy to get swept up and enjoy its mechanics, language, and intelligence without critical viewing. But this time, because I know it so well, I've been able to step back and take note of two aspects of the show that I've not tended to in any concerted way — its structure and its politics.</div><div><br /></div><div>After seeing it so many times, knowing it so well, this time I noticed some things about its structure and tone. It is much more theatrical than I'd ever realized (it's still hilarious to me that it gets described as "gritty" and "realistic" when it is so conspicuously mythological and unabashedly contrived). Each scene is a set piece that could just as easily be on stage as on TV. There's a rhythm to the delivery of information, affect, character, and message in each scene that is distinctly theatrical. Which is to say, scenes rarely proffer information solely propelling plot. No, each scene is crafted in such a way to tell us something about these characters and their relations or, as it's David Simon, to preach. My first two dozen times, I was enthralled. This time, I noticed how carefully constructed each scene is — like a comedian's joke, punchline and all. Just watch. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HPa8LsNXR4Y" width="560" youtube-src-id="HPa8LsNXR4Y"></iframe></div><br /><div>And I noted its politics which are more ambivalent than I'd thought. This will be a topic of a different essay — the politics of David Simon and "The Wire" and, perhaps, "The Deuce." But, for now, I want to note that after watching it so many times, this time I was suddenly troubled that I found myself rooting for the cops to come up with more clever ways to spy electronically on the drug dealers. I was rooting for the surveillance state! </div><div><br /></div><div>I finally saw how what the show really offers is not an empire that's broken due to bad actors and their bad policies but an empire in a time of change and collapse: the institutions of the past, with all the supposed dignity Simon loves so much simply don't work in the mass age. I realize this is reductive; there is a deep ambivalence at the heart of "The Wire" — an understanding that it's all a game while, at the same time, taking a hard a moral stance. I look forward to fleshing this out — a fleshing out only possible (for me) because I've seen it so many times. </div><div><br /></div><div>That may seem obvious but Simon seems to criticize these institutions — police, politics, schools, newspapers — for becoming too obsessed with numbers, with quantity over the quality of life (<i>juking the stats</i>). But such is what happens when there are so many people: we lose the local school house in which everyone knows everyone — and we can't go back. This is what happens when technology changes: we don't keep offloading ships by hand and nor should we, even if we do end up dredging the canal. What Simon never seems to suggest is that these institutions aren't broken; they're anachronistic. He seems to suggest reform is needed when it's all too clear that we need new kinds of institutions with new technological age for a world with an ever increasing population — not schools simply without testing but maybe, just maybe, no schools at all. Or schools of a form we've yet to consider. </div><div><br /></div><div>But that's for another essay. My point here is that after watching "The Wire" so many times, I was able to be more critical, to not be so utterly seduced by its characters and dialogue but to be able to see its political logic at work. Repetition, then, as a vehicle for critique. Sometimes, it's only when we know something so well that we can be critical. Rather than blinding us, repetition can sometimes be the only way to see something clearly. </div><div><br /></div><div>As the great Danish philosopher, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_(Kierkegaard_book)" target="_blank">Søren Kierkegaard argues, repetition is life</a> and nothing less than a miracle: to do the same thing again <i>and</i> anew! Such is life and its daily miracle: we repeat ourselves to create ourselves. We repeat to reckon life — to learn, enjoy, create as every day we wake up ourselves and not ourselves. We make dinner, listen to music, tell our sweeties we love them, shower, hug our kids, have sex, go for walks, do yoga, watch "The Wire." In repetition, we live the manifold experiences of life — comfort, education, health, pleasure, and in the same gesture, the inauguration of the new. In repetition, we live — even if it looks like I'm just lazily watching "The Wire" for the 27th time. </div>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-62020412074242572542020-11-23T12:55:00.002-08:002021-08-14T18:33:42.460-07:00Let's Go, Cum, Hard, and the Idiocy of "Grammar Nazis": On Repetition, Creation, & Language (with Reference to Derrida, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, & Lucretius) <p><b></b></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8ae1x4GKGCsRklBJD1hjVanE2WkltmVmGciofbmiZe1-Xnt7phxzMQLR01wpV-3j7wATu6zSboYgY_WpMCouIVMWNlsrl0K2abNmZYNgXIC0Q7VD7S91tPiP0jywTXiFIeXxWJ1jW2ag/s660/how-to-text-a-girl-post.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="440" data-original-width="660" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8ae1x4GKGCsRklBJD1hjVanE2WkltmVmGciofbmiZe1-Xnt7phxzMQLR01wpV-3j7wATu6zSboYgY_WpMCouIVMWNlsrl0K2abNmZYNgXIC0Q7VD7S91tPiP0jywTXiFIeXxWJ1jW2ag/w400-h266/how-to-text-a-girl-post.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">This is what invention, creation, poetry looks like. </span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b><p></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">The Idiocy of "Grammar Nazis"</span></b></p><p>Occasionally, someone who knows of my academic pedigree — a doctorate in rhetoric — but not of me assumes I cringe at the presumed deformation of our language by the youths and their apps and such. In such an understanding, I probably belong to a group who pridefully call themselves "grammar Nazis" — a most horrific, idiotic phrase.</p><p>First of all, its unabashed pride in such a self-designation suggests they believe that while the Nazis chose the wrong object — namely, killing Jews — their commitment to rules is impressive and worth emulating. When, of course, it's precisely commitment to rules that leads to the slaughtering of others.</p><p>And then there's the fact that grammar is not a set of laws that hover above language, legislating its every utterance. For where and how could such laws exist? That is, how could laws of grammar legislate from outside language when they are necessarily articulated by and within language — that is, by particular people of a particular place and time, hence undermining their claims to be universal laws of language? For those who care about such things, this is the logic of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction: any claims to be outside a system remain of that same system — so have no inherent ability or right to legislate universally (one way to see this is that the stater of rules always has an agenda as part of the mix they're legislating). Every law that dictates the use of language is itself a use of language — and whence those rules? </p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">There is No Outside. Grammar is immanent.</span></b></p><p>Language is always already used, even if no one per se owns it. It flows in us, through us: we are its dummies and its inventors. It's us and not us (this is fodder for another essay at another time). There's no way to stop the use of language for a minute and excuse ourselves from its fray in order to legislate its use. We can say this or that is a rule of language — but that is just another voice speaking. And whence its rules of rules? Rules are always already emerging, always changing, relative to the bodies they consider — meanwhile, those bodies are themselves always emerging and changing. Rules and bodies inflect each other. Neither comes first; neither comes second. Rules are immanent. </p><p>Anyway, I deeply love the relentless invention of language at the site of its everyday use. While I've thought and written about this for decades, this fact — this endlessly inventive way of language — becomes more apparent every day as I age. I understand very little of what people post on the Twitter and Facebook. No doubt, this comes from my willful ignorance of our times; I don't know much about what people call politics or celebrities so I miss the references. But my failure to understand these tweets is not due to my ignorance of their referents as much as it's due to the fact that this language has new way of making sense. The<i> how,</i> not just the <i>what</i>, is always changing. </p><p>As I lead a reclusive life, the language I understand is, at this point, an older language. I have not been party to its unabashed reinvention — a process that has been accelerated by the ever increasing velocity of global communication. People write and read each other all the time — at near infinite speed. Tweets, texts, posts, podcasts, blogs, vlogs, comments, emojis, retweets: we communicate more than ever and with people outside our immediate geography. New rules, new words, new senses are being created on the fly all the time. </p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Let's Go, Hard: Repetition as Invention</span></b></p><p>I'm walking with my son the other day, a constitutional after our respective days of video school and work. I was talking about fun things I used to do with my friends when I was his age — 17 — to which he'd reply, <i>Let's go.</i> The first time I stopped as I thought he wanted to go somewhere. But his tone and delivery suggested something else — not phatic (phatic discourse is an utterance that keeps communication open but doesn't declare anything per se — <i>um, what was I gonna say?, ahhh</i> are all examples of phatic discourse) but a discursive tic signaling appreciation à la the well worn, <i>Cool</i>. So I kept talking and, every once in a while, he'd utter this understated yet emphatic <i>Let's go. </i></p><p>I had never heard him say this. His go-to is usually, <i>That's hard</i>. I love hard in this sense so much: it speaks to the mode, the <i>tone,</i> of the duration and its affect. For what, precisely, is hard in this situation? It's not the object of discussion which, more often than, is the <i>dropping</i> (I know that one! I love the architectural space of "dropping" an album; it's so much more beautiful that "releasing") of some new track or an outfit such as, say, a Fila tracksuit. Both those things are hard but not because they themselves are materially hard. No, what's hard is the way those things blaze a trail through life, through the miasmic drone of the everyday, pushing aside nonsense thanks to the fortitude of their constitution, their hardness. Hard, too, is the mode of the affect he himself is feeling — it may be elation or desire but, either way, it's coming in hard, not soft, not gentle, not ambivalent: hard. Hard moves with purpose, cutting through the noise.</p><p><i>Let's go</i> is of another order, another tenor, of discourse. It de-emphasizes the object under discussion and privileges the interlocutor's enthusiasm instead. So he'd never say <i>let's go</i> about a song. That'd be ridiculous. The song may be hard; such is one of its qualities. <i>Let's go</i> speaks to the experience of his companion. His friend says,<i> I love that song! It's hard!</i> To which my boy might reply, <i>Let's g</i>o. it declares his willing participation in the joy of his interlocutor:<i> I want to enjoy your enjoyment — let's go there! </i>What an outstanding invention! </p><p>People invent language all the time. We are all poets, to some degree, some of us more than others. But, for all of us, language is a living beast that is continually morphing. There is no<i> one</i> language. In fact, we might say that there is no language <i>per se </i>(<a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/COFRTT" target="_blank">this was the argument of my dissertation;</a> I suggested we replace what we call language — a set of rules based on signification — with rhetoric, an always situated event of communication). All there are are people talking and writing and communicating and failing to communicate or failing to communicate what they thought they wanted to communicate. Some of those people occasionally decide to write books laying down the rules of this language. But those are just more words being written and spoken and, unfortunately, taught. These books of rules don't leave this realm of speaking and writing, suddenly levitate to become law over all uses of language. No, these rule books are just so much more language on the same plane as as the rest of language. There is no outside: <i>Il n'y a pas de hors-texte</i>, as Derrida writes. </p><p>We're all in this stew of language. We are of it. We reach for sounds, words, gestures as we reach for an itch (or so says the great French philosopher and phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty). Our bodies, our lives, are metabolic engines of linguistic creation and memetic repetition. Sometimes, we are inflection points, taking up words, gestures, ideas that we find and discover other possibilities in them before we send them back into the world, changed. The French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, calls this repetition.</p><p>Repetition is not the same thing. If it were in fact the same thing, it would alas be the same thing, not another thing — and hence not a repetition. I know that sounds sophistic (an odd pejorative, I must admit, as I consider myself a sophist). But the movement within the argument is, precisely, movement: it introduces time into logic, change into the way of things. Repetition is an action, an event, in and of time. Repetition happens, an act of transformation within the trajectory of this or that without any transgression of an original. (I have a friend who I hope is reading this who's always confused at why I talk about repetition. This is why: it provides a logic of identity without allegiance to an original, a true. Repetition inaugurates delirium, vertigo, as the ground gives way — but maintains form.)</p><p>Repetition is, in a sense, the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinamen" target="_blank">clinamen</a></i> in an atom's trajectory (I take that from Lucretius; I highly recommend reading his "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura" target="_blank">On the Nature of Things"</a>), the swerve of difference, sending that word, gesture, idea along a different trajectory than the one it was on: a turn — not a break. It's still that word, that gesture, that idea — only it's anew, going down a different path (perhaps a mutation, perhaps an expression of DNA: does it matter?). </p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJXWJcXnmFFrV8hRmi2ODeEWEigKdt0W_QQ16D-ko7DOz9LyRzVIGbQI7d7fOyePI94E8LvW2vubIhlr0sO7thsUru8Sp05eOpmq9ABf8P7_GofUbHWNr3kPzvRpvAhogNnYrVtln6V9E/s2048/IMG_3790.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1324" data-original-width="2048" height="259" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJXWJcXnmFFrV8hRmi2ODeEWEigKdt0W_QQ16D-ko7DOz9LyRzVIGbQI7d7fOyePI94E8LvW2vubIhlr0sO7thsUru8Sp05eOpmq9ABf8P7_GofUbHWNr3kPzvRpvAhogNnYrVtln6V9E/w400-h259/IMG_3790.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-size-adjust: auto;">Repetition is an inflection of a trajectory — </span><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-size-adjust: auto;">clinamen</i><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-size-adjust: auto;">, as Lucretius might say. The point here is: repetition is a novel use that doesn't break the thing but extends it in a new direction. In this case, it's the phrase, "Let's go." Now, coming from the mouth of my son and used in this way, "let's go" signifies —</span><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-size-adjust: auto;"> performs</i><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-size-adjust: auto;"> — excitement at following someone to an emotional or affective place — not just a physical place as in, </span><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-size-adjust: auto;">Let's go home</i><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-size-adjust: auto;">. Instead, it's:<i> E</i></span><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-size-adjust: auto;">verything you say sounds awesome! Let's do that! Let's go there! Let's go!</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>For example, people say <i>let's go</i> in such and such a way, usually using it to mean: "Let us leave here and go to that place." No doubt, it's been used sarcastically —<i> School? Yeah, let's go there. Not.</i> And then it was used by my son-poet-artist to mean:<i> let's go to that place of your joy which may not, in fact, be a place at all but a mode of enjoymen</i>t. A turn, not a break. And not the same thing, quite. A repetition</p><p></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Repetition is an Event</span></b></p><p>Repetition is an action, an event. Consider a classical music score, say, Sibelius' "Violin Concerto" (which I was fortunate to hear, and see, performed at San Francisco's Davies Hall). Every time it's played, it's at once the same thing and a different thing — a repetition. And this is what's essential to understand: <i>Nothing is essential!</i> All the versions of that Sibelius Violin Concerto aren't judged against an original or true one. Which would that even be? All there are are versions. W<i>hich doesn't mean some aren't better than others.</i> Of course some suck and some are great and most have some good parts and some crappy parts but for our discussion that's neither here nor there. Ontological equality isn't aesthetic or moral equality. <i>Doy.</i></p><p><i>Doy</i> has enjoyed great longevity in my life. It was part of my vocabulary, even if rarely used, for decades and decades. Heck, I still use it. Although that might be the very first time I've used, or written, heck. Eeesh! I do love a good<i> eeesh</i>, too, with or without an exclamation point. What I love about <i>doy </i>and <i>eesh</i> is that they make no significant pretenses at all — they don't claim to be words signifying anything. Both <i>doy</i> and <i>eesh </i>are discrete packages of reactive affect: of astonishment at one's stupidity and cringing due to all kinds of things, respectively. </p><p>Language is always being reinvented from the inside out — that is, not by someone outside of language but by someone in a moment doing something new with a word or phrase or construction. Language is always emerging, always morphing, at different speeds in different places and in different ways. The dialects that spin up over the interwebs happen so swiftly and behind the backs of me and most people I know. Meanwhile, my language plods along, slowly, for better and worse. </p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">To Cum or Come?</span></b></p><p>I like when I am confronted with a new word — which is more likely not a new word per se (a neologism) but a new use of a word, a new possibility of how that word can go. We've seen this happen to <i>literally </i>and <i>random:</i> they simply, or not so simply, mean new things today to people under 40. </p><p>Here's a twist on a word that I've been torn on: cum or come? I can never decide. There's something compelling about <i>cum. </i>The hard <i>c</i> that is not as inhumanly hard as <i>k, </i>the <i>c's </i>curvature softer than <i>k's </i>angularity; then on on to that <i>u</i> with its guttural lack of discretion (it's visually unbound on top and phonically unbound, lacking a consonant to end its groan — <i>uuuuuuuuu</i>); and <i>u</i> is certainly not liquid — it's no <i>s, </i>for instance — its body suggesting greater viscosity (<i>s</i> winds, slithering; <i>u </i>moves slower,<i> </i>siting contently, all bulging belly and unabashedly open for more; and then ending with an<i> m</i> that never really ends — or, better, ends with breath's end much as the declared <i>yum</i> before a bowl of steaming <i>pho</i> could be written, with little argument from an editor, <i>yummmmmm. </i></p><p><i>Come, </i>on the other hand, seems too uptight for the task at hand (especially during this pandemic). The closure of the <i>o</i> stands in stark contract to cum's unbound <i>u</i>. And that final <i>e</i> serves no purpose other than to quiet the moans of the <i>m; </i>it doesn't even do its admittedly mystical and downright acrobatic job of elongating the <i>o</i> before the <i>m</i>. That takes some finagling! But in come, that <i>e </i>is nothing but a buzzkill. <i>Comb</i> is a better word for cum than come, minus the <i>o </i>that's suddenly elongated by a <i>b</i> of all things. Shouldn't <i>comb </i>be pronounced <i>cum</i> while <i>come</i> should be pronounced comb?</p><p>Anyway, I realize now my only hesitation writing <i>cum</i> is that it smacks of porn-speak. But so what? I am a fan of porn but, even were I not, I am a fan of dialects, of what Deleuze and Guattari call "minor languages," inhabiting one language with your own, remaking it from the inside,<i> as</i> the inside.<i> </i>And <i>cum</i> is a good reinvention, a good repetition, inspired. <i>Cum</i> it is, then!</p><p>(It's funny to me how weird public discourse is about sex in general and about pornography in particular. Should I not have written about cum? Why, exactly, is it verboten to discuss? Major search engines don't even try to autofill for you if you type a word it associates with sex acts. Type anything else into your search bar — just an <i>accent aigu</i>, ´ — and Google jumps to attention, eager to make suggestions! But type <i>cum </i>or<i> </i>even<i> fellatio </i>and it draws a blank — not because you've stymied its intelligence but because it's made a judgement. Porn, it seems, is beneath it. Yes, it gives you returns on your search (driven by profit motive, of course) but it's not lending a helping hand — not because it can't but because it chooses not to. What a douche.)</p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Grammar Is Anything You Can Get Away With</span></b></p><p>Those who insist on certain rules of grammar, on meanings staying the same, are great enemies of life. And they're dangerous as they drape themselves in sanctimony. The rules of grammar provide the weak a weapon to bludgeon others with (hence their oddly gleeful self-designation as Nazis!). </p><p>Grammar, I want to suggest, is whatever you can get away with (pace Marshall McLuhan's "art is anything you can get away with").</p><p>This is not to say that there's no such thing as grammar. Of course there's grammar. Grammar is the way words go with each other to make sense — adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, punctuation, verb and pronoun inflection. But sense is multiple and always changing, as are words, so grammar is multiple and always changing, too. Grammar is not a set of rules but modes of operation for this complex, ever-morphing organism we call language. Rather than grammar being a cage of communication, let's see it — let's think it and teach it — as a mechanism of creation, of invention, of new senses, of new ways of making sense. </p><p>Mind you, just because it's new and creative doesn't mean we have to like it. And just because something's old doesn't mean we should keep or abandon it. I return to the sophist's creed: the right thing at the right time. And that always depends, as is the way of <i>kairos.</i> We don't need some set of agreed-to rules. Make your own sense. </p>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-45879059413288257742020-10-13T19:27:00.000-07:002020-10-13T19:27:22.046-07:00Window as Screen: On Brendan Lott's "Safer at Home"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhStmxTkjCS3WNwKc0GyOsPT-NveJzVaB5vgHQa73eKnD7uYBjagvGh5DbnfnMxj6wN77FXqWYwS9ImD9Q6JmeqMaZ-E719BvYoS8B-25BRXGJ7rpRFMDF6z7mt42ukO2S12wawTddkz-M/s1748/Screen+Shot+2020-10-01+at+10.51.31+AM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1344" data-original-width="1748" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhStmxTkjCS3WNwKc0GyOsPT-NveJzVaB5vgHQa73eKnD7uYBjagvGh5DbnfnMxj6wN77FXqWYwS9ImD9Q6JmeqMaZ-E719BvYoS8B-25BRXGJ7rpRFMDF6z7mt42ukO2S12wawTddkz-M/w400-h308/Screen+Shot+2020-10-01+at+10.51.31+AM.png" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi06HT3s82-O9wCAexadcGb5I2lsINSF7je06JHxLcxdtm0LURqpIEB0oCQ5dD1Gx89IGTCTJTdhUwZuGnHW36V4AAQp8IbHXmVAmE4hxMCJ6-XQ0iT6RlRoqT7FJNEADxS9GJdza0uG4E/s1772/Screen+Shot+2020-10-01+at+3.35.06+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1342" data-original-width="1772" height="303" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi06HT3s82-O9wCAexadcGb5I2lsINSF7je06JHxLcxdtm0LURqpIEB0oCQ5dD1Gx89IGTCTJTdhUwZuGnHW36V4AAQp8IbHXmVAmE4hxMCJ6-XQ0iT6RlRoqT7FJNEADxS9GJdza0uG4E/w400-h303/Screen+Shot+2020-10-01+at+3.35.06+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHOthd5IzTcSkRQrNj9b2Yp_PhIUpu2ae_UixJ9nrStCujNruX5UYHZvUgBL-qUS51C_MNGFYgIOipTNvWtGrl4y1qMq5QZDtP2Rse_KaXJ_9_5n6yRc2lLOL_sRXf-xXRo-z7m6SCuQQ/s1764/Screen+Shot+2020-10-01+at+3.35.15+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1352" data-original-width="1764" height="306" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHOthd5IzTcSkRQrNj9b2Yp_PhIUpu2ae_UixJ9nrStCujNruX5UYHZvUgBL-qUS51C_MNGFYgIOipTNvWtGrl4y1qMq5QZDtP2Rse_KaXJ_9_5n6yRc2lLOL_sRXf-xXRo-z7m6SCuQQ/w400-h306/Screen+Shot+2020-10-01+at+3.35.15+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><p style="text-align: left;">The conceit seems simple enough. During this "shelter in place", the artist takes photographs from his window into the apartments around him. As Brendan Lott, the artist, suggests there seems to be a voyeurism here, the thrill of peeking into the private lives of others, capturing them in candid moments unaware of the camera. While there may be some ethical questions raised, the project seems at heart a humanist one: we will glimpse the individuality of people, their most private selves — and, in that way, discover our humanity amid our isolation.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Think of Hitchcock's "Rear Window" and the rich tapestry that is humanity. Each window opens onto a different narrative, a different way of going. Peering past the street and into people's lives, we witness the pains and pleasures of each — those moments of individuality, all these stories and lives splayed before us. And while, for Hitchcock, violence may lurk, so do all these other modes of the human experience — love, loss, longing, despair. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="350" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/m01YktiEZCw" width="525" youtube-src-id="m01YktiEZCw"></iframe></div><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">Hitchcock's film relies on a certain common architecture of seeing and self. There is what we present to the world; and then there is what goes on inside. The window, especially the rear window, allows us to catch a glimpse of what is not visible in the light of the social, on the street. Our eyes look through windows to glimpse the interior life of people, to see their individuality. Hitchcock then projects this seeing through windows onto a screen as we sit in the audience, complicit in an act of voyeurism that, despite ethical quandaries, affirms our humanity. Indeed, were we not looking, a man may have got away with murder. </p><p style="text-align: left;">But such, alas, is not Brendan Lott's photo series, "Safer at Home." These images operate within a different architecture of seeing and self and hence presents a very different image both the image and interiority. Which should come as no surprise. Since the days of Hitchcock, the status of the image has radically shifted as the act of imaging — the circuit of camera and screen — has become instantaneous, always-on, and ubiquitous. </p><p style="text-align: left;">The image is no longer <i>over there </i>or up on the screen, in theaters, or even on TVs. The image is right here. It's everywhere. It's us. The camera is no longer a mediation of the real. We have become image (of course, <a href="https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Bergson/Bergson_1911b/Bergson_1911_01.html" target="_blank">Henri Bergson argues everything is image anyway as matter = image</a>). In the age of the networked image, we are all imaging machines. The very fabric of the social and personal identity is stitched together with images — and so what it means to look, to photograph, to be inside, to be alone have all shifted since the days of Hitchcock's cinema.</p><p style="text-align: left;">For instance, I first encountered these images by Mr. Lott in my Instagram feed alongside pictures of my friends' kids, my own kid, friends hiking, clips from Godard films, pictures of Bob Dylan, images from the Tate, ads for mattresses and air filters, pictures of my cocktails and plants, friends on vacation, promotions for podcasts. It's all one feed, one screen — ads, the personal, "art" living side by side. There is no special place for the image, no special act of photography. We take, consume, and distribute images at the same time and on the same device. This is not Hitchcock's world in which the camera might capture a glimpse of interiority and then project it later; this is the world of the networked image in which there is no interiority per se. There is only projection.</p><p style="text-align: left;">A quick survey of Mr. Lott's images tells us much. The apartments are near barren, their windows revealing not individual idiosyncrasy but uniformly vacuous lives. It's unsettling, like the opening shots of a dystopian film. This is not the baroque view Hitchcock gives us of so many lives brimming, dripping out the windows of their isolation if only we'd look. No, what we see here are lives evacuated of their particularity — bare floors, white bedding, the ubiquitous plants in their inevitably white pots, their verdant vitality mocking us.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And no faces. If Hitchcock offers us as look into the faces of humanity, including its horror, Mr. Lott gives us something else entirely: the horror of the faceless. This is a literal claim: in Mr. Lott's photos, we only ever see a chin, a side of a face or, more often, just a headless body, the face obscured by this or that. And it's a metaphoric claim: if the face is the site of our individuality, these faceless bodies articulate the evacuation of individuality in the age of the network.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Networks are strange things. While they have the ability to decentralize certain flows, such as how the internet distributes information, networks have this seemingly paradoxical effect of breeding homogeneity. This is what we call the network effect: rather than the proliferation of identities and the rise of idiosyncrasy, we get the opposite — mass movements towards fewer and fewer nodes, fewer and fewer possibilities. To wit, look at the explosive rise of monopolies such as Facebook (which includes Instagram, the home of these images for now), Amazon, and LinkedIn. </p><p style="text-align: left;">This same network effect that leads to monopolies in business leads to homogeneity of identity. In the pre-networked world, we were isolated and so were inevitably weird. Identities had no choice but to follow their own trajectories as there were minimal external coercive forces. Sure, a king or priest might give you a hard time if you were <i>too</i> weird— if and when you crossed paths. But there were no media pervading the home and hence not many external forces shaping our very identities. Guy Debord calls this the Spectacle. Today, not only does this Spectacle of mass media enter our homes, we actively project ourselves into the Spectacle, into this network of images and identities. And, as is the way of networks, rather than our individuality becoming amplified, we tend towards commonality. And so, as with businesses, we become more homogenous as we gravitate to a few network nodes. The nuance of life is effaced.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Look at how many of Lott's pictures involve people looking at their phones or recording themselves with the ubiquitous ring light. When we peek inside these windows, we don't see the interiority of a life. We witness the projection of a life — a life that looks like every other life. These images are a far cry from the baroque humanity of "Rear Window."</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvUJSX7JpsUS6F-s91oXQxxOGIwhVSXw0Hx1-hUqm0Y4rQ1oR58zXbXseRvY927vty_MJWRpP7RFiB5eEzSfCo7fEcExP10e6MSbuyjW2AhGO-2nsSR99apwkmKy8HhtQenL2y8-Wka4Q/s1752/Screen+Shot+2020-10-01+at+3.35.42+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="1752" height="311" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvUJSX7JpsUS6F-s91oXQxxOGIwhVSXw0Hx1-hUqm0Y4rQ1oR58zXbXseRvY927vty_MJWRpP7RFiB5eEzSfCo7fEcExP10e6MSbuyjW2AhGO-2nsSR99apwkmKy8HhtQenL2y8-Wka4Q/w400-h311/Screen+Shot+2020-10-01+at+3.35.42+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZrarDyxHf9ZiWWAhWsFdt-jP-bb4lvrQGOZpCfqAVH6Fq9u_wDsrPOiEWRK8mBJlor-u9nMSmuDEc-4X5Cz-oXR17eoVRhuMReQsM2yxZqEkTa45DvyFAV91Owrm6SSvds09g5qph4yU/s1770/Screen+Shot+2020-10-01+at+10.51.11+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1344" data-original-width="1770" height="304" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZrarDyxHf9ZiWWAhWsFdt-jP-bb4lvrQGOZpCfqAVH6Fq9u_wDsrPOiEWRK8mBJlor-u9nMSmuDEc-4X5Cz-oXR17eoVRhuMReQsM2yxZqEkTa45DvyFAV91Owrm6SSvds09g5qph4yU/w400-h304/Screen+Shot+2020-10-01+at+10.51.11+AM.png" width="400" /></a></div><p style="text-align: left;">Covid and the lockdown accentuated this evacuation of interiority. Suddenly, solitude became the defining term of the social. That is, rather than our homes being a respite from social coercion, a place to be free and weird, our homes became the mandated site of social existence. Our solitude became synonymous with social participation. <i>Which is the very condition of social media and the networked image!</i> Just as the network turns us inside out, always already projecting ourselves, lockdown transformed our refuge from the Spectacle into the very Spectacle itself. There is no longer an inside; everything is outside.</p><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">Writing about this series, Mr. Lott tells us "[t]he subjects don't know they are being looked at. The only way to get this level of unselfconscious intimacy is through secrecy." But the subjects <i>do</i> know they're being looked at! In fact, they are projecting themselves into the network to ensure they're being looked at. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Despite what Mr. Lott writes, these photographs are not in fact voyeuristic as there is no voyeurism anymore. We are all on display, already a circulating image. Mr. Lott harkens to a pre-network age in which there was such a thing as photography in which the camera mediated the real, such a thing as seeing inside, such a thing as a secret. But, in this series, he is not peering into windows and nor are we. We are all looking at screens.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Mr. Lott entitles his series, "Safer at Home," a sardonic, almost macabre title. What we learn from seeing these images is that there is no longer any safety at home for we are all evacuated, turned inside out, atomized within the network, all these isolated nodes gravitating towards the same center. The line that would separate a screen from a window has been erased. We no longer peer through windows; we view screens.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And rather than this exiling our loneliness by enmeshing our most private selves in the very fabric of the social, the effect is quite to the contrary. The loneliness in these images is palpable, is devastating. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinFtUDbXtTL91XToaU0XeIaaVA6NVXbxmOi-onmhnCdwXX6vGvcU8RS2SbnatxubjwgDuH8QvRCrklBaYBqIhMTfqs5YqOdDY6e_mycigFGppC04xiaFGbfK6T-hAM7Osfis2DKd2m_vU/s860/Screen+Shot+2020-10-13+at+4.59.13+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="663" data-original-width="860" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinFtUDbXtTL91XToaU0XeIaaVA6NVXbxmOi-onmhnCdwXX6vGvcU8RS2SbnatxubjwgDuH8QvRCrklBaYBqIhMTfqs5YqOdDY6e_mycigFGppC04xiaFGbfK6T-hAM7Osfis2DKd2m_vU/w400-h309/Screen+Shot+2020-10-13+at+4.59.13+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyPSoU6c1l7OIAlY7HCICEQ6M75ARxma-nawzGJMNLxEfRhjwMrbjyoPgy7ra_FNCZfL_-kh1ajkbXb9b-3zJogIMNu-_7OfhjCh2XY_NT_nB5wDi8yA7e0vGIRJnhGA6SQ_5wxzZSCdQ/s865/Screen+Shot+2020-10-13+at+4.59.29+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="664" data-original-width="865" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyPSoU6c1l7OIAlY7HCICEQ6M75ARxma-nawzGJMNLxEfRhjwMrbjyoPgy7ra_FNCZfL_-kh1ajkbXb9b-3zJogIMNu-_7OfhjCh2XY_NT_nB5wDi8yA7e0vGIRJnhGA6SQ_5wxzZSCdQ/w400-h308/Screen+Shot+2020-10-13+at+4.59.29+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFxPxhGfM8JH2aaTQpTIFFc2Bcj2MglpupB7j27lOVTt5wh_Vt5N2m-DtY66s2-0ZX7c6-StRfe3CipLXql7n9hsdSYCXyNUgKGK0RGKYtlDWv2ezOmfNnkWT-k3-6GpnBUec5RTj-u9A/s861/Screen+Shot+2020-10-13+at+4.59.41+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="664" data-original-width="861" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFxPxhGfM8JH2aaTQpTIFFc2Bcj2MglpupB7j27lOVTt5wh_Vt5N2m-DtY66s2-0ZX7c6-StRfe3CipLXql7n9hsdSYCXyNUgKGK0RGKYtlDWv2ezOmfNnkWT-k3-6GpnBUec5RTj-u9A/w400-h309/Screen+Shot+2020-10-13+at+4.59.41+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-9638696463290492612020-09-28T13:04:00.000-07:002020-09-28T13:04:15.423-07:00The Erotic is the Universe Touching Itself<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8fLPFeH0LmI6ZwsbUFu9jyktpDjcc9rzNfLCmake6TmnLiYEhkXgTPXvHO3KpDzC0Vy8G8E8_JJOp4lpPgFSNArcsdjfxqU9ibYjgVhvmz5REESfOZJShrYIFudwk2iQmRXEUzRFGsfM/s512/magents.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="512" height="346" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8fLPFeH0LmI6ZwsbUFu9jyktpDjcc9rzNfLCmake6TmnLiYEhkXgTPXvHO3KpDzC0Vy8G8E8_JJOp4lpPgFSNArcsdjfxqU9ibYjgVhvmz5REESfOZJShrYIFudwk2iQmRXEUzRFGsfM/w516-h346/magents.gif" width="516" /></a></div><br /><p>The erotic is not univocal. Sure, as a category it delineates a certain kind of experience — the erotic speaks to us via our sexuality, through different modes of physical arousal which, of course, is never <i>just</i> physical as we will never have been <i>just </i>a body. (Of course, being <i>just</i> a body is itself a trajectory, a resonance, within the erotic: to be free of the ego and its narratives of selfhood — <i>I am such and such a person, dammit!</i> — and be driven by sexual thirst alone. <i>Ahem</i>.) Eroticism is not only what happens<i> in there</i> or when you're feeling <i>that — </i>and even what happens in there and the feeling of that are wildly varied, even within an individual<i>. </i></p><p>The erotic is a mode of relation that pervades our behaviors, attitudes, assumptions to greater and lesser degrees all the time. For instance, my feelings for Deleuze are erotic. They are not <i>solely</i> erotic. And I don't usually masturbate to Deleuze — although I have been known to discuss Deleuze as foreplay (yes, I am single for obvious reasons). And then there's how I wrote my dissertation, especially my chapters on Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. But I'm not ready to share that with the world quite yet. In any case, I most certainly feel an attraction to Deleuze's ideas and books and writing that is palpable, physical, that gets me all excited and tingly, my cheeks flushed, my heart aflutter. I definitely rub myself against <i>A Thousand Plateaus</i> — and don't get me started on <i>The Fold. </i>(Not surprisingly, my erotic relationship with Deleuze is different than with Deleuze and Guattari.)</p><p>Consider your life for a moment: Why these friends? This set of beliefs? These
films, books, magazines, artists, tchotchkes, hobbies? We are seduced by them. In as much as we are drawn to other bodies — people but also art, films, ideas, food, places, plants, animals — we are run through with the way of the erotic.</p><p>The erotic, then, is not the sexual. I may watch a pornographic movie but not feel drawn to it at all. In fact, this is usually the case. It's clear that the image is sexual. Just look at it! And it might have millions of views on PornHub with an equal number of thumbs up. But, for me, it's not erotic — and not just for me: for every PornHub video, there are inevitably thumbs down and exponentially more for whom it never showed up on their radar. It may even be an image of something I find intensely erotic in the abstract. And yet there's something about that image that doesn't draw me. I gloss over it as I gloss over most things in this life — as so much noise in my periphery.</p><p>The video, however, remains sexual. "Sexual" is a designation of fact — even if one contests the factuality of this or that image being sexual. "Sexual" is a matter of fact, a declarative claim about the thing. The erotic, however, is a state of a body — of my body. The erotic is a relation — a very particular kind of relation. The sexual may or not be erotic to me or you just as the image of the erotic may not be sexual.</p><p>For instance, I may see an image that is not sexual per se — let's say a photograph of someone I don't even know, perhaps a friend of a friend, just sitting on a bench with just such a light, just such a smile, just such a posture — and feel undeniably, unabashedly drawn to it. I may swoon; become a bit flushed; see it in my head for hours, days, weeks. I may become beside myself, as they say (what an expression!).</p><p>Note that I say "it" as I don't know if I'm drawn to the person or not. What's pulling me is the image much as a magnet pulls; the person and the image are different materials so <i>of course</i> they have different pulls. Which should not be surprising as the stuff of an image and the stuff of a person are different stuffs even if they share certain traits — which tells us something about images as well as eroticism. The erotic is a form of magnetism, a pull between bodies at a molecular level, and hence is a material relation, even if the bodies are invisible (such as an idea, memory, or feeling). </p><p>Take writing which, for me at least, is intensely erotic yet is not sexual per se. To write is to go with other bodies, with ideas and words and structures; it's to manipulate them, play with them, have them wash over me as I return the favor and, together, we go through a series of postures and positions at once physical, conceptual, and affective. In many ways, writing is the assumption of positions between and among bodies of various sorts — words, ideas, affects, grammars, people. </p><p>Writing is always an orgy. It's why I'm so obsessed with prepositions. For anyone who regularly reads my writing, they'll notice that I often say things such as, "a posture is a way of standing <i>in</i>, <i>towards</i>, and <i>with</i> the world." For what are prepositions other than who goes where in the orgy of argument?</p><p>To inscribe, even with pixels, is to caress and be caressed by others — including you, dear reader. Yes: reading is most certainly of the erotic as words, images, figures, ideas penetrate us in a rhythm that moves us, gets us worked up, excited, energized. I haven't listened to a book on tape yet but I can only imagine the erotic potential — to have a world whispered in your ear!<br /></p><p>What is persuasive writing other than seduction? It need not be the <i>only</i> mode or even dominant mode. I mean, just pick up Kant: he may be flirting but it's not going so well (which, as Nietzsche maintains, tells us lots about the culture that is in fact seduced by that mode of going). Yet he's building an entire world in and with you — and that can't help but partake of the erotic just as it can't help but partake of culinary appetite. We consume and are consumed; such is communication; such is perception; such is participation in the social; such is life. And while not all modes of consumption are erotic, the erotic is never far off as we're always necessarily taking it<i> all </i>in with our eyes, skin, nose, ears, minds, selves. We live in the push and pull of the world. </p><p>And that is where we find the erotic: in the in-between. The erotic relation necessarily ruptures your boundaries, your containment. It is a mode of becoming undone and done in the same gesture. </p><p>Mind you, I'm not saying that all beckoning of the world is erotic. We have other drives and draws. We run from fear. We scream in anger. We twitch in annoyance. In all of these cases, the world has moved us a certain way, drawn us in, stirred us. </p><p>Such experiences — fear, anger, annoyance, the erotic — may seem pretty common but the fact is most of the world passes us by with no push or pull at all. Most things just don't affect us, speak to us, whisper our names. Most of the time, most of the world passes us by with nary a thought. To be angry about something means that thing, of all the things, got up in your business, as the kids say. </p><p>When something irritates us, angers us, frustrates us, annoys us, it's entered a rarified space, distinguishing itself from the wash of sensations that defines our experience nearly all of the time. Something about that thing draws me in even if only to anger or annoy me. How odd is that? I mean, it makes sense that something draws me in with an erotic seduction. But how is it that something pops from the fray, lures me into its orbit, expends my energy only to anger me? What is it about that relationship between me and it? Why do some things affect us so thoroughly, for good and bad, while others drift by as if they'd never existed?</p><p>Nietzsche argues that these relationships are constitutive of who we fundamentally are. We are, in some very real sense, the things that affect us. We are defined by the things to which we are receptive — and by our reactions to those things, the terms of that affective exchange. We know people who are drawn, say, to the misery of the world — they call to discuss it, linger on it, seek it out. Such is how they're constituted, the workings of the mechanisms that are their way of going in the world. We <i>are </i>the selection, speed, and rhythm of being affected. </p><p>What is is that defines the push and pull of the erotic, that distinguishes it from, say, anger and annoyance? (Before some of you leap out of your seats, I am not saying that anger and the erotic are mutually exclusive; we all know they are often intimately intertwined.) What is this tug that we call the erotic? What does one magnet say to another to entice, or repulse, so decidedly? </p><p>The tug of the erotic is a matter of harmonic resonance: that image — it's all images, if we believe Bergson, and I do — vibrates at the frequency of me. As such, the erotic is an event, not a quality per se. The erotic happens. It is always an event of exchange or, rather, of harmonic resonance as the way of disparate bodies become a common chorus. That curve of back, that turn of thought, that flitter of hair, language, gesture: they pull me out of myself to forge a collective resonance. </p><p>The erotic, then, is never univocal. By definition, it is a nuptial, a meeting, a convergence of modes. And is radically material, even if invisible (such things as style and affect are invisible but embodied components of an erotic draw). There is no erotic distinct from particular bodies interacting. The erotic event — which is redundant as it's always an event — is particular, a localized happening between and of these bodies here. There is no erotic generality — no idea, no concept, no universal trait we can all <i>erotic</i>. The erotic necessarily happens between particular bodies in time, in place, of circumstance. </p><p>The erotic is an operation of the universe. Just as we can see that bodies of a certain speed and weight circle other bodies with some regularity — we call these orbits which are part of solar and galactic systems of attraction — all bodies are drawn to other bodies with greater or lesser intensity. On a planetary level, we have all sorts of names for these forces such as, well, gravity. But there are multitudes of such forces that put bodies in relation to other bodies — and forces that draw bodies together with such vim. The erotic is one such force, a sub-set of magnetism. </p><p>As Bataille argues, the erotic is hence always an undoing of stipulated border of bodies and identities. This erotic event is not <i>in</i> a body; you can't touch it, hold it, even know it. It is an experience that happens despite you. It is <i>of</i> your body — a matter of possession by forces that exceed you. Just as magnet has no say in it being pushed or pulled, so it is with all bodies: we are drawn and repulsed despite our identities, self, narratives, despite propriety — and even despite desire.</p><p>There is, as Bataille likes to say, a violence within the erotic. You're leading your little life with spouse and kid and job and such and then, bang, you stumble into the erotic. It is a force, an event, that doesn't care for your situation. It happens and tears apart anything and everything you might imagine as your self, your life, your values, your truths, your ethics. This doesn't mean you have to act on it. You are still ethically and legally liable for our actions. But the erotic doesn't care about any of that. It's happening regardless of your will, your desire, your life. </p><p>And it's putting you into a pre-ego flow. The erotic affirms your existence by dissipating your identity. This is why people work so hard to parry eroticism, to duck its pull: the erotic is an undoing of your social, existential scaffolds. </p><p>But that is precisely the power, and luxury, of the erotic. You are liberated from decision making — of deciding whether to swipe left or right, to propose or not. And liberated from the tyranny of the self. The erotic is a force — not from on high so you can parry it but it is <i>of</i> you and your way of going in the world. The erotic <i>is</i> your participation in the world in a way that belies your best intentions, your social standing, and your very self. It happens as a the very conditions of your being alive, being this body, being here and now — as a Dionysian body. To find oneself within the pull of the erotic is to participate in the mechanics of the universe itself. </p><p>No doubt, the how and why of your experience of the erotic is complex. We can turn to psychoanalysis, the Situationists, to Deleuze and Guattari in order to better grasp the systems that manufacture desire. But this doesn't matter to the erotic; it's indifferent to your ideology, your false consciousness, your indoctrination. The erotic speaks to your participation in the cosmic body in a way that is indifferent to your explanations. Which is not to say you shouldn't question or explore these explanations. It's to say the erotic happens despite all that.</p><p>The erotic is the very act of the universe arranging which bodies go with which. It's beautiful, if unsettling, to experience the universe organizing itself, caressing itself. O, to experience that pull, that draw of the world! To know — to feel — you are part of cosmic becoming! When you feel that tug of the erotic, when you experience that resonance that makes and unmakes you in the same gesture, that is the universe touching itself.</p>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-68083606509692200942020-09-14T13:10:00.001-07:002020-09-14T13:10:58.258-07:00On the Terrible Tryanny of School<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKiTOA1uLO4BWIN1-WaEG7Lt6I7xMDKqsLWB7prG1KxPCXZj7pQ9ATZEdAeRWM0SVgfaUMWew8Jv13OfNYst2gdSd8zhAWP8lsYyJ7yYnLrBITicbATkY_jL59mcA59KyMFWAViL_CVSo/s1600/empty-classroom_elementary-school-middle-school-high-school.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="333" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKiTOA1uLO4BWIN1-WaEG7Lt6I7xMDKqsLWB7prG1KxPCXZj7pQ9ATZEdAeRWM0SVgfaUMWew8Jv13OfNYst2gdSd8zhAWP8lsYyJ7yYnLrBITicbATkY_jL59mcA59KyMFWAViL_CVSo/w500-h333/empty-classroom_elementary-school-middle-school-high-school.jpg" width="500" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This picture is horrific to me and says so much about school: line them up! Make them sit, like little prisoners, while we harass and harangue them with some state mandated syllabi created by morons in a room far from here. <br /></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I have to be honest, when I think about tyranny I rarely think about the state. This is due, in part, to the relative luxury I enjoy being middle class and white. When I see cops, I rarely assume they'll stop and frisk, harass, or shoot me. Indeed, my relationship to the tyranny of the state is rarely so immediate. But this doesn't mean the state isn't tyrannical; it means it's masked itself as simply what we do.<br />
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I like to say that the first time I felt the strong arm of the state was when I was applying to college. Ronald Reagan was president and he'd instituted mandatory registration for the draft. The punishment for failing to do so was relatively mild but had a significant effect on me — a refusal of federal student loans. So, with great hesitation, I marched myself into the local post office and registered for said draft, writing a large "CO" in yellow highlighter over the form and, in the white space at the bottom, wrote what I'd learned I should write to build my case for being a conscientious objector: <i>I object to all wars in any form</i>.<br />
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But this story leaves out a more explicit coercion of my body by the state: I went to school. Every day. Very early in the morning — like, absurdly early in the morning. I left school out as an example of state tyranny as it never even occurred to me that this was the state forcing me to do things. It never occurred to me <i>not</i> to go to school. And that's because, unlike war, school was situated in another form of tyranny — a much more powerful, more insidious form: the discourse of my home. What we valued at home coincided, in the case of school, with the state's mandate.<br /><br />
Now, the state demanded I attend school for such and such a time — you had to attend until 16 in New York; but it's 18 in California — more on that in a moment. Unlike many laws that are enforced haphazardly — for instance, pot was illegal my whole childhood and yet was readily available — the law stipulating we go to school is indeed enforced. In fact, the present vice-presidential candidate for the Democratic party, a former Attorney General of California, sought to rigorously enforce these laws, threatening to jail parents whose kids were truant. The law demanding we attend school is not one easily parried or ignored without serious repercussions. <br /><br />Which, you have to admit, is kind of odd: why is the state so adamant about where our children spend their days? The problem with protesting it is it sounds like I don't care about children. All I can hear is the "Simpsons," "Won't somebody please think of the children?" I do care about my child; I just can't figure out why the state cares so much — and thinks it knows better than I do what's good for my son (and better than he, at 16, knows. Sixteen! And he's forced into these re-education camps every day! It's insane).<br />
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And yet, when it came to school, it wasn't just the state coercing me. It was my family. School mattered in my house. Every night at dinner, we talked about school. I never questioned this. But I was aware that, in elementary and middle school, my indifference to academics was frowned on around my dining room table. To this day, they tell the story of how all I wanted to talk about was gym — and isn't that hilarious? Whereas the state only demanded I attend in body, my family demanded I attend with all of myself. Now <i>that </i>is powerful power! <br />
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As a parent myself, though, this has changed. Unlike my parents, I have a wide definition of what might be called education but see almost none of it reflected in these schools. So I don't feel my son should spend his days dealing with the ingrained idiocy and ideology of schooling. <br />
<br />
My son is bright in so many ways. But, for the most part, none of those ways are the subject of his so-called education. This is of no matter to his schools or the state. He <i>must </i>attend — or we face the intrusion of the most horrible state institution, social services. Our decision not to send our son to school so he can learn and do different kinds of things — that is, be a human being — could be construed as negligent parenting, punishable by jail and worse. <br /></p><p>And, in California, no one under 18 can legally work without having passed some state exam proving you've mastered their curricula. This is true madness to me: to deny his right to earn money without giving money in turn is downright egregious. If my son is legally not allowed to work — and I'm not taking about child labor laws; my son is 16 — then the state should be providing the income that he could be generating. The fact that this is never mentioned, never an issue, never on a ballot, never part of any politician's platform tells you everything: it is simply the norm. And nothing is more powerful that entering the status of the norm.<br />
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As parents, we have no choice in the matter. Sure, resources allowing, we can send my son to private school or, the better option, home school. But both private school and home schooling are still under the yoke of the state's force and, worse, its vehement stupidity — those darned mandated syllabi that demands my son regurgitate various forms of math equations.<br />
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Now, perhaps that doesn't sound so tyrannical. But I sometimes think of it from my son's perspective: his body and time is fundamentally controlled by the state for an alarming percentage of his life. And not only is he not learning a thing from their syllabi, he's made to feel bad about himself as the core of these curricula are reading and math, the two things his dyslexic, dyscalculiac self sucks at. And there's nothing he can do about it. The state is fucking up my kid and both he and I are helpless to do anything about it. It's infuriating. <br /></p><p>These, then, are the lessons I try to teach my son about school. School, especially in California, is the tyranny of morons backed by a police state apparatus. Know that. And then figure out how to make your way through it without making your life worse — how to do minimal work but make it seem like you're trying; when to fake being sick so you're liberated at least for a bit; how to turn assignments into something that serves your own interests such as learning new software or starting a business. This, I tell him, is the only lesson from school: learning to operate in a system run through with idiocy and enforced by morons with real power over you. <br /></p>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-13489483454788792012020-09-13T19:57:00.002-07:002020-09-13T19:57:47.882-07:00Standing before My Bookshelves & Bathing in the Delirium of Duration, Memory, & Sense Making <br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhxiWc__zAAhbYazeTI8CK_jYh_1BAw8heA6kuSvpWun6hbYJaBzVoIwJxsak-FDD8Vau0moIKZqyG28pzzjJOKww_B_rfCoP_fnhi0HidVxBt1cl94gTVormCgxz_BpgGakoBEFT-Dgw/s1600/IMG_3536.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhxiWc__zAAhbYazeTI8CK_jYh_1BAw8heA6kuSvpWun6hbYJaBzVoIwJxsak-FDD8Vau0moIKZqyG28pzzjJOKww_B_rfCoP_fnhi0HidVxBt1cl94gTVormCgxz_BpgGakoBEFT-Dgw/s400/IMG_3536.jpeg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My new well appointed home library. Please note: I am not a bibliophile. I am not "proud" of my books; they are not signs of how learned I am or what I've accomplished. Frankly, I'd just as soon not have any — were I not me. No, these books on shelves are intensely private, my memory externalized and splayed there before me. At times, these shelves repulse me, like seeing my own entrails. Other times — and usually — they delight me, this undulating of my own becoming glittering and glimmering, all this sense making, with and without me. <br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table><p>
<br />
I was forced to move a month ago. Such is the casual cruelty of a housing market. In my latest pad, I have lots of room. So much, in fact, that I am able to dedicate an entire room — albeit a very small room — to my books. I even added a comfy chair, ottoman, reading lamp (with a bulb whose color I can change), and small table for my cocktail and such.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I found myself sitting in that chair just gazing at my books, my eyes scanning the spines, reading both individual titles and taking in the gestalt — a gestalt that remains radically particular to these books and me (gestalt<i> is</i> always the particularity of a generality, isn't it?). And I was struck, nearly knocked over, by the complexity, volume, and variety of what I was taking in — the sheer volume, yes, but that coupled with the velocity of commingling, of relationships between and among all those ideas, people, phrases, feelings, images all conjoining, colliding, cruising by, forging networks and associations of every sort and all through time, all these narratives of my becoming, of their becoming, of my trajectory, my present, all these narratives of them and me at once possible, mythical, actual, and always multiple — <a href="https://hilariousbookbinder.blogspot.com/2018/05/why-how-body-without-organs-or-any.html" target="_blank">a body without organs</a>, a Matthew Ritchie painting.<br /></p><p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFFUQ7m3c4kFdwI_bHz_R4FE3DW2uM2v3EQsaKTcW6MEQ3nWOjsB16sNvHy7KPSextkE24VJ95cwRBXy4128WaKFmgaJH_pS1sInw90hLgvdkotZ30rJNJZz99M5KUE8_1OIgaR72QnrA/s983/matthewritchie_diagramy.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="539" data-original-width="983" height="274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFFUQ7m3c4kFdwI_bHz_R4FE3DW2uM2v3EQsaKTcW6MEQ3nWOjsB16sNvHy7KPSextkE24VJ95cwRBXy4128WaKFmgaJH_pS1sInw90hLgvdkotZ30rJNJZz99M5KUE8_1OIgaR72QnrA/w500-h274/matthewritchie_diagramy.jpeg" width="500" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Matthew Ritchie illustrates my experience of standing before my bookshelves — an experience which borders on chaos but is defined by a complex act of remembering and making sense. In fact, the experience marks the juncture of memory and intellect, the point at which you can't separate the two. <br /></td></tr></tbody></table> <p></p><p>As my eyes followed the line of books, each one stood up as a thing, an
object that's been in my world, inflecting it just so. I was inundated
with fragments of images — how I carried it around (or didn't); where
it laid its head, Husserl's "Ideas" suddenly in my back pocket (I selected it for its size), on a
bar, on a desk in that studio on 22nd St. All these things crisscrossed
with memories of places, feelings, people, experiences, each book a metonymy, a point continuous with other points, with a
life rife with romance, ideas, bodies, things — where I was living, who I
was dating, what I was drinking, what I was doing and feeling. This is
of course the way of all things — books are not special in that way: they are not just reminders. They <i>are</i>
our memory externalized, right there. (A metonymy is something that is
continuous with a thing or event. In films, we see someone raise a knife
and in the next shot, we see blood dripping down the wall: that blood
is a metonymy, continuous with, and constitutive of, the murder via
knife. Should you care, synecdoche is a part that stands in for a whole — as in "I have 50 head of cattle"; metaphor bridges distinct trajectories — rather than seeing blood after seeing the knife, the film cuts to lightning.)</p><p>But books are not like other things. For example, we put them all together on shelves so we can see them all at once. The fact is I don't have many
things in general — and certainly not that I line up like this. I have a
good bar, it's true, where my booze beckons; I do like to sit in front of it, too, as I consider my appetite and the possibilities for an evening. Other than my booze, though, I have a few sweatshirts that hang on some hooks; shirts on hangers I rarely notice; several
works of art hung here and there; and a few knickknacks from my son scattered around the
house. Books on a shelf stand out in our lives, creating this intense condensation of things and memories and more, this panoply of associations and thoughts splayed before us. I imagine that this is what some people, famously
some women, must feel when they scan their closet of clothes — I've seen it in movies! — all these
memories along with all these inflections of themselves, all these possibilities for the day, for the night, for life. (Books and clothes are in fact similar in the way they inhabit us as we inhabit them.) Bookshelves, like closets, are dizzying. </p><p>Just perusing the spines, I was enthralled. Delirium lurked as this undulating, near-chaotic flow of images, ideas, and sensations poured over me. But there was this other force, this other event, happening at the same — I was sorting, connecting, making myriad connections at infinite speed, this juncture of memory and intelligence. Standing in front of my bookshelves, I experienced these two registers at once: a torrent of images and affect alongside the event of sense making. O, it's humbling to experience the speed and prodigy of sense making that carries on elaborate operations without my control. Standing there, I remember and process — I make sense of all this data, both visible and invisible, past and present — just as I breathe. </p><p>So many layers, speeds, and trajectories. So many arguments being made, unmade, remade. Multiple senses being forged, new and old, coherent and not — some with me, most without me. To stand there before these shelves is to be taken up by these forces and events — and, I have to say, it feels downright decadent. What a luxury, what a treat, to let all this play over me without purpose, without telos: to just bathe in the teem. <br /></p><p>This experience is not just memories but memory itself. That is to say, these are not just recollections; this <i>is</i> memory. Memory is not a repository; it's an organizing and processing of events, ideas, feelings, bodies, a mode of making relations of varied durations. Memory is not in the past per se; in fact, memory is <i>necessarily</i> in the present. How else could you remember? Memory is the duration of things from the past, those events still happening now. If they stopped, you wouldn't remember. Memory is the present experience of the duration of past events. <br /></p><p></p><p>Meanwhile, the books carry on without me, indifferent to my memory, creating their own connections — Nietzsche talking to Socrates, of course, but also to Lispector, Houllebecq, Badiou, Hunter Thompson, Bruno Schulz, Frank O'Hara. Can you imagine what Ginsberg and Kant are saying to each other? Books speak with other books in all sorts of ways — through figures and phrases, ideas and notions, moods and affect. If I were not standing in front of these books, they'd still make all kinds of sense. Books always talk to each other out of earshot, enjoying conversations we can't imagine, in registers equally obtuse. (This is another way clothes and books are related, just as my books actively forge connections among themselves regardless of me, clothes in a closet don any number of ensembles to one's liking or not.)<br /></p><p>Standing there, I become another conduit within the mix, another text with its own connective, textural, textual tissues. Some connections flow through me as I become their conduit, Nietzsche meeting Burroughs at the party that is my experience, metabolism, and sense making. My particular way of going opens up channels, flows that might not have existed without me. I am an inflection point as these connections use my flesh as their meeting ground, my neurons their stepping stones, their meeting place for mutual exploration. I am surely not the one in control here, even as I process and sense make at infinite speed — sorting, combining, connecting, rejecting. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBtAKAxksLeoMU8vePV0jgviukOk3qsZrBP25Ag5nDfXLFs1Iz8QTMvJDcDJeCQWyK16mZC90DmbJP7gEIWRh1eN9Un549CjfdC1E_cJ2fzd2X3JsVSQ6ufDJpTZ_M3H_6coU3R4ecVyE/s1600/IMG_3547.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBtAKAxksLeoMU8vePV0jgviukOk3qsZrBP25Ag5nDfXLFs1Iz8QTMvJDcDJeCQWyK16mZC90DmbJP7gEIWRh1eN9Un549CjfdC1E_cJ2fzd2X3JsVSQ6ufDJpTZ_M3H_6coU3R4ecVyE/w512-h384/IMG_3547.JPG" width="512" /></a></div><p>Needless to say, books on their own — not even assembled on shelves — are odd creatures, unlike other things. Sure, they're things in as much as they're material we touch and feel. But they exist, mostly, to deliver something other than themselves — ideas, sensations, figures, styles. Which is one reason one's own books are so strange: their invisible offerings are made flesh. I know Gadamer's "Truth and Method" not just as set of ideas, not just as a style of thinking and writing, but as this particular book — this edition, sure, but this actual book with my scribbles, stains, tears. This makes my own bookshelves fundamentally different from a bookstore. </p><p>Of course, if I lose this book, I don't lose Gadamer's ideas. Books, then, operate in multiple registers — like Jesus, books are body and soul: when their body goes, their soul persists. Each book is an object and
a set of ideas, a juncture of flesh and concept, and hence enjoys different, even disjunctive, temporalities — as a thing, the book is mortal; as ideas (and styles, moods, notions), it is immortal. Books flourish in multiple registers at once. They're these
dusty, more or less beautiful objects, run through with associations,
soy sauce, and sweat. And, in the same breath, they fall away leaving so
much in their wake — perspectives, styles, modes, moods, notions,
figures, ideas, gestures. A book is a bound infinity that undulates in
multiple registers that may or may not intersect each other. </p><p>Now add the particularity of <i>my</i> books, <i>these </i>books <i>here,</i> and we introduce even greater temporal and affective complexity. I have associations with that particular edition of Husserl's "Ideas"
that are embodied — my body, that book, these places, these situations. And while Husserl's ideas may not be fundamentally tethered to these bodies, I nonetheless do have an embodied relationship to those ideas. That is to say, my reckoning of Husserl as a 28 year old in San Francisco is a memory that simultaneously intersects and diverges from my embodied experience of this particular book's thingness. While a book's ideas may be immortal, my experience of those ideas enjoy a particular duration, entwined and embodied by me. <br /></p><p>So when I remember Husserl's book here and there and who I was dating and what I was drinking, I also have memories of my understanding of Husserl's ideas. And this memory mixes with those other memories but also mingles in another register, constantly interacting with my embodied experience of other ideas throughout my life. I may remember thinking Husserl was saying such and such — how I came to believe that, how that understanding of that idea mingled with all the other ideas I had from other books — even as my understanding of Husserl changes. </p><p>Now, if I were writing an academic essay, that memory of an understanding of Husserl may be more or less irrelevant. But standing in front of my bookshelf, those memories are all fluttering about. There are all these memories, these <i>durations</i> of things and versions of myself coming to all these different ideas, all happening at the same time at different speeds. As I stood there, I suddenly understood — which is to say, I experienced — the juncture of memory and intelligence, memory as sense making and sense making as memory, a chiasm among diverse eddies and spirals. <br /></p><p>What an utterly odd, uncanny, and exhilarating experience it is to sit before these
bookshelves, this stirring flood of flesh and feeling, of ideas and
notions, the speeds and intensities of time as turns of phrase and interpretive techniques and ways of going flow
through these versions of me in different registers and rhythms at once — all while the books themselves perform pirouettes of sense in my periphery. The effect is peculiar, beautiful, unsettling in the best way. Standing there, I am an active node within a vast network of networks, this precise juncture of memory and intellect, of recollection and sense making to which I am privy and not, where I am as much thinker as thought. To stand before my books is to stand with my very
becoming as it vibrates with the becoming of the world — and it is sumptuous, vertiginous, delirious. </p>Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-68763100520288646212020-09-01T16:59:00.000-07:002020-09-01T16:59:40.359-07:00It's Your Relation to Things, Not the Thing, that Matters<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Just because we all like the same thing doesn't mean we have much in common. I have no interest whatsoever in belonging to a Deleuze reading group. In fact, few things repel me with such vigor. </td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">What interests me, attracts me, is the relationship to things. I may have more in common with your relation to ballet than someone else's relation to Deleuze even though I know nothing of ballet. It's all the relation, the way of standing towards things. </td></tr>
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I read Deleuze. You read Deleuze. So it seems we have something in common. And no doubt we do. But if you relate to Deleuze by parsing his stance towards Hegel or treat him and his texts as dogma, well, I'm going to run away. What I look for in the world, what interests and engages and finally attracts me, is one's relationship to a thing — not the thing itself.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately for me, this is not how we organize the social. For instance, dating apps ask for your interests — hiking, travel (everyone loves to travel, it seems), yoga, feminism (can you be interested in feminism but be opposed to it, whatever that means?), films, food (food has to be the oddest one — not cooking, not fine food, not Asian street food, but food). The assumption, of course, is that if you like hiking and feminism and someone else says they like hiking and feminism, then you have something in common and may be a good match. Algorithms are defined by such things. There are even dating apps that are dedicated to a given interest (the most horrific sounding one has to be <a href="https://www.meetmindful.com/" target="_blank">Meet Mindful </a>which begins by asking you to choose from two of the following: yoga, spirituality, volunteering, green living, mindfulness, travel, personal growth, conscious diet, meditation, fitness, creative arts. <i>Oy vey.</i>).<br />
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Now, this can of course make sense. I think of, say, a Meet Up for knitting: you want to share insights and experiences around it — tips, excitement, shared passion. The relation one has to knitting is more or less irrelevant in this context. What you're looking for during those weekly few hours is someone who shares this niche passion of yours so you can discuss it, learn, teach, share. And then go home.<br />
<br />
But in a dating app? For friends? These are intimate relationships that involve entire ways of going, distributions of humor and seriousness, of passion and indifference. For instance, I like teasing and being teased by my friends and lovers. For me, it's a sign of intimacy but it's premised on an assumption of irony — that everything is finally silly as it all dissolves into the infinite flux of it all. So all my interests and quirks are tease-worthy as they're finally so much pretension in the face of the infinite cosmic flux. To the surprise of few, this has proven the downfall of many romantic relationships. My one relationship that lasted the longest — my 14 year marriage — did in fact have a shared inclination for irony.<br />
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This is to say: what matters isn't the things, it's the relations to the things. Please note that I am not saying that those in a relationship must have the same relation to life. What I'm saying is that how these relations interact with each other matters more than the fact that both parties "like" the same thing.<br />
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For instance, let's say we both "like" to hike. But I like taking my time strolling through the mountains; I stop and linger; I feel no need to get to the top. I feel alive when I do this. In fact, I feel so alive doing it I list it on my dating profile (I would never, in fact, do such a thing). You list hiking, too. But, for you, to like hiking means you won't feel satisfied until you get to the top of the mountain. And then, tomorrow, you want to get to the top of another mountain. I see the mountain as a playground; you see it a something to conquer. We both love hiking. But we have fundamentally different relationships to it. (To avoid this, I stopped saying I like to hike; I say I like to stroll. But this will to qualify with language — my particular relationship to language — is its own point of divergence from would-be lovers.) <br />
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This is one reason I avoid people who declare they read the same things I do. I have absolutely no interest in being part of a Deleuze reading group as I have my relationship to him and his texts — which I relish as I relish art and music, as something that delights me and incites me to see the world anew. But if you read Deleuze to master his concepts, to counter Hegel, to know how he is accelerationist or not, a Marxist or not, an anarchist or not, I'm just not interested. Such conversations bore me to death. There's nothing wrong if you read Deleuze like that but that's just not how I read him. I take my pleasure; you take yours. Sharing each other's readings of Deleuze delights neither of us so why try? Deleuze alone won't save us.<br />
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Or take drugs and drinking. The people with whom I've have had the least issues are those who abstain, not on principle but from lack of appetite. But when I've dated people who also claim to enjoy drinking and drugs but have a different relation than my own, all sorts of problems arise. For example, people who "like" drugs but see them as, say, a guilty pleasure or temporary flight from "natural" being take note with how I see (and consume) them, namely, as just more fodder for living, not fundamentally different than books, kale, or hikes — stuff to be incorporated into a life of vitality as need and desire arise but are by no means necessary (I'd have problems with devout psychonauts or addicts, as well — and for the same reasons, although differently played out.)<br />
<br />
What I am interested in is people who relate to anything the way I relate to Deleuze or booze and drugs — who enjoy it not as dogma or something to master but as something that delights and incites and, simultaneously, doesn't matter at all. The fact is I have more in common with someone who reads ballet as I read Deleuze — even though I know nothing about ballet and he knows nothing about Deleuze. What matters, what creates my connection to another person, is how their relation anything meshes with my relation to things. The particular thing is more or less irrelevant.<br />
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I say more or less because, sure, the thing matters. I know very few people who share my love of Deleuze and have a relationship to him that I enjoy. There were three such people but one of them just died — a death that resonates all the more as the connection is so rare. I cling to the remaining two for, should they disappear, I'll be left alone with my Deleuze. That is not the end of the world but it can be, at times, a cruel fate — to love something in such a way and not be able to share it with anyone. That said, if I had no one, I'd still not join a Deleuze reading group. <br />
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This is all the more reason to focus on relations, not things. What grabs me at a party or first date is not that someone loves this or that; what grabs me is how they stand towards those things. If they're very serious about their Buddhism, I am immediately turned off. This doesn't mean she can't love it, be deep into, take classes, read everything. But, for me, I want my partner to have a fundamentally ironic view of things — to love whatever it is but believe, at the same time, that everything gives way, including the ol' Buddha. If she thinks said Buddha is the one that matters — or Jesus, Nietzsche, hiking, yoga, veganism — <i>and,</i> in turn, finds my irony heretical, I have no choice but to turn away. To deny my relationship to things is to deny my very life for we are not just <i>what </i>we consume but <i>how</i> we consume. <br />
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And, in turn, the seriously religious — whether it's Buddhism or Judaism — have to turn away from me and my irony to maintain their way of going.<i> </i>If she's so serious about this Buddha and has no irony, she not only has no interest in me — even though I'm fond of the big old fat laughing Buddha — she is metabolically repulsed. Sure, we both "enjoy" reading Lao Tzu and contemplating being here now. But that's irrelevant as life is not a series of thing; it's a way of taking up things. <br />
<br />
I hesitate to enter this territory but we see this insistence on things rather than relations in the ascendancy of identity politics. What matters, we're told, is that someone is a certain color, gender(s), sexual orientations, religion, nationality. And, sometimes, these do matter. But, for example, does the fact that the president is a woman more important than how she stands towards, say, abortion rights, war, the police state, the tyranny of mandated school syllabi?<br />
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Oh, having an ironic relationship to life can be lonely! I'd sure enjoy having an ironic president, regardless of race, gender, or religion. I'd love to see an ironic Kirk steering the Enterprise. I'd welcome an ironic lover into my life. Because if the president, Kirk, or my would-be girlfriend all love Deleuze, I might be intrigued but that, alone, does not suffice. What I relish is their relation to life. Now I'm not exactly sure what a dating app for ironists would look like but I'm definitely curious. My assumption is there'd be no one on it which, in the end, might be the perfect dating app for me.<br />
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Life is not things. Life is how we stand towards things. Life is an event, a happening, a way of taking things up, of consuming them, making sense of them: life is 4D, not 3D. Life is style, manner, modes of going. Things may entice, repel, incite, inspire, kill, educate. But such things still pale in comparison to the wonder, beauty, and joyful complexity of how we relate to things. Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-52589806511914599992020-08-29T17:31:00.000-07:002020-08-31T12:30:35.137-07:00Nietzsche, Socrates, Foucault, Larry David: On the Philosophy of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"Curb Your Enthusiasm" is a philosophical show. It deploys a certain vision of how the individual stands towards the world — towards its written and unwritten rules, towards other people, towards friends, towards romance. It's a show of ethics.<br />
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No doubt, one could argue that every show does this. "Friends," for instance, deploys a vision of the world — what a friend is, what romance is, what work is and how to stand towards it. But unlike "Curb," "Friends" never explicitly addresses its stance, never goes out of the way to question other stances, never offers any alternative ways of going. "Friends" offers us the ideology of what we might call a heteronormative, achingly dull way of life — which may involve a philosophy but the show is not philosophical <i>per se. </i><br />
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"Curb," on the other hand, focuses on one character who stands towards the world in a clearly <i>different </i>way — and that difference is precisely what drives the show. If "Friends" gives us characters acting on a stage of accepted terms, "Curb" moves those terms to the foreground. "Friends" is propaganda, offering its ideology as the norm; "Curb" is philosophical, opening up fissures within the normative ethical while proffering a different ethical stance. (And, yes, I am conflating "Curb" and Larry David just as I'm conflating Plato's dialogues with Socrates; more on this below.)<br />
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Like Plato's Socrates, "Curb" gives us Larry, a character who interacts with the world in a fundamentally different way. And, like Socrates, Larry refuses inherited terms, questioning them at every turn and even more adamantly when he confronts someone who is so sure of themselves. But whereas Socrates is really only concerned with big ideas about truth, morality, language, politics, Larry takes on the micro interactions of the social.<br />
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This is a dramatic break from Socrates. David is not concerned with big questions. On the contrary, he solely focuses on the stuff of the everyday. When he's in front of Nancy Pelosi, the big issue for him is dry cleaners — who get away with all kinds of things! For David, "philosophy" is no different than anything else — it's a way of standing in the world driven by desire, stupidity, appetite. In this sense, David channels Nietzsche who also rejects big questions for the matters of everyday life such as diet, weather, and recreation. It's this world that matters, David and Nietzsche tell us, not the philosophical life or after life.<br />
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Like Nietzsche, David is a radical individualist. Which is to say, he avoids what Nietzsche calls the herd or mob mentality. The show skewers those who take stands, who take sides, whether they're the Ayatollah or zionists. He is not on anyone's side — which is often the source of conflict with a world that tends towards mobs, tends towards fixed belief systems. I think of Kramer in the AIDS walk, refusing to wear a ribbon — and being beaten up by this mob of "do-gooders." That's the David position (even though he didn't write that episode).<br />
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Or this scene from "Curb" in which Larry, not knowing what a baptism is, tries to save a man he believes is being drowned — and triggers a war of sides. Note the particularly vile portrayal of both sides, Jews and Christians. And then look at his face at the end: it's a look that implicates himself: <i>What have I done? </i>But if that were all it expressed, this would be a sit com about a buffoon. As it's a philosophical show, his look says: <i>What's wrong with these people? </i>And then<i>: I don't care either way. Can I just go home? This is ugly. </i>In this one scene, we are given an entire ethical philosophy.<i><br /></i><br />
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This episode, in what is seemingly a small moment, reveals the depths of Larry's individuality and, finally, his social isolation. He and Cheryl, his wife, are packing for the wedding — he's yet to disrupt the pre-wedding baptism. Larry is trying to understand the Christian will to proselytize the world, comparing it to demanding others eat lobster. <i>Eat lobster! Eat lobster! You should eat lobster! </i>Cheryl, in a devastating look of dismissal I know all too well from my own life, utters, "Lobster and religion. I really don't see the similarities."<br />
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<i>But that's Larry's whole point! They are the same!!!</i> This life is nothing but things we do, driven by desire and will, not truth or holiness. Eating lobster and believing in Jesus: for David, they are not different in kind. They share a fundamentally common fabric of existence — namely, an all too human will and action. Life, he tells us, is what we do not what we believe. What seems to be a casual, even heretical, conflation of lobster and religion is in fact a profound philosophical reordering of the world. And Cheryl's absolute lack of understanding leaves Larry out on a ledge, utterly alone.<br />
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If I may offer a personal aside, this is an experience I know all too well from my own life and failed romances and fundamental social isolation. Parrying the dominant discourse which masks itself as self-evident truth is exhausting and, finally, isolating. But David, unlike myself or Nietzsche or Zarathustra, insists on social participation. He does not offer or seek a line of flight, no mountain top where the air is too cold for others. No, he remains within the social fold despite never fitting in. And while Buddhist detachment might offer him a way to exist within the social with greater peace, that fails him too as we are run through with the social, all the way down. There is no outside. <br />
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And so, as there is no outside, Larry operates at the limits of inherited social discourse, finding his freedom, as it were, in the rupturing of assumption. All rules are up for grabs. When he and Cheryl are told there might be a terrorist attack in LA and she says they have to stay in the city anyway for the NRDC fundraiser, he suggests maybe <i>he</i> can leave — and, from the look on her face, we know he's broken some rule about romance and eternal love, as well as about political commitment, a double faux pas. This comes up again when they renew their vows and Larry wants exemption from the eternity clause. Many no doubt feel he's just being an unromantic lout; I am sure no one blames Cheryl. But Larry is in fact making a radical move, breaking the terms of inherited romantic discourse even at great risk to his emotional well being.<br />
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In many ways, David takes up the mantle of Michel Foucault, revealing the terms of discourse that dictate our lives. For that is where power exercises itself: in the everyday, the ways in which we are coerced by custom and assumption. There is no free exchange of ideas, say Foucault and David: we are always already enmeshed within the micro-mechanics of power. Indeed, that's where we feel power most intimately — in the ways we unknowingly conduct ourselves, assuming that's just the way things are, what Foucault calls being "in the true." David refuses such inherited rules of social behavior, offering other modes, other logics, different ways of standing towards each other. He is a freedom fighter, refusing to acquiesce to the terms of the social majority! He is the social assassin.</div>
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Rather than situating himself as a member of the herd blindly following the rules, David, like Zarathustra or Neo seeing the code, operates at the level of rule making itself. He sees that the social is dictated by rules that are more or less arbitrary and driven by some combination of idiocy, greed, and desire. When he walks in a room, he doesn't assume what everyone else assumes. Rather, he assumes that because rules are arbitrary, he can call them into question and even rewrite them. Needless to say, this makes him anathema — whether to Gil's wife or to the Ayatollah (in Season 9, the Ayatollah puts out a fatwa on Larry).<br />
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From one angle, Larry is a kind of ethics police. He considers a rule, assesses it, then decides if it's a rule worth following or not. As such, he runs the risk of being an ethical enforcer himself — a bit like Socrates who roams the city looking for people who think they know things then argues with them until they no longer think they know things. Both David and Socrates are kinds of cops, policing the world for transgressions. They are certainly both what my mother would call a nudge.<br />
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But, like Socrates, David is an ironist. Sure, he takes positions, but he's not a zealot, even if his behavior often becomes zealous. This is where the role of "Curb" comes in: it renders even his most zealous moments not serious. At his most adamant, the clown music kicks in. Larry's position in the show, like Socrates' in Plato's dialogues, renders him fundamentally ironic — making claims and undoing them in the same gesture. (The greatest irony of Plato's Socrates: he says not to write — in words you're reading; hence Socrates writes and doesn't write at the same time. And, let me say, George Costanza is a poor interpretation of Larry as George lacks irony. George has Larry's refusal to follow inherited rules, yes, but unlike Larry, George is never ironic; his face and expression remains univocal whereas Larry's is always double — saying it and not saying it.) <br />
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The David philosophy is fundamentally an ethics — a posture of standing in, with, and towards the world. We live in a social, he tells us, that is inevitably defined by the micro mechanics of power driven by all too human idiocy and herd mentality. But David tempers that Nietzschean-Foucauldian position with echoes of Socratic irony. Where Nietzsche proffers the strength and health of the individual as a remedy to the herd, Larry offers a relentless contestation and rewriting of social rules. And yet rather than those rules being the birth of a new order, they are ironic as they, too, are inevitably idiotic. <br />
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No one, not even the viewer, thinks Larry is ever the one who is "right." Such is how thorough this show is: it's never serious even as it proffers a radical ethical philosophy. No
one believes he is the ethical one, a social freedom fighter, or
a philosopher. The show ensures that he is never taken seriously. It's irony and idiocy all the way down.Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7461948747659071092.post-21188552959674519382020-08-21T11:09:00.002-07:002020-08-21T11:10:03.841-07:00It's me! Giving an Overview of Nietzsche on the Free Man Beyond the Wall Podcast with Peter R Quinones<div class="style-scope ytd-channel-name" id="text-container" style="text-align: center;">
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A little bit more of me speaking Nietzsche......</div>
Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.com0