Brilliance Under the Radar

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I've been thinking recently about some of my favorite writers, favorite artists, favorite musicians — and how some of them have never "made it" in the traditional sense of the phrase. They are not renowned; they do not make money directly off their art. Most not only don't make money from their art, their art costs money to make.

If I write an essay about the films of Wes Anerdson, people may read it. If I write an essay about the films of Marc Lafia, no one gives a shit. If I quote Lafia in an essay I'm writing, the citation carries no weight; if I quote Deleuze, then I must know my shit.

But are these people any less great than the well-known, well-distributed, and well-paid? There is an alarming prejudice that declares that for something truly to be great, it must be well known. It must receive accolades; it must have the imprint of capitalist, popular success.

And yet many of my favorite artists, none of whom will likely ever be so imprinted, have changed my life in profound ways. Because they are fucking brilliant.

I am thinking of the great poet and writer, Lisa Robertson, who's written the downright devastatingly brilliant, The Weather and Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture (whose title alone is an entire pedagogy and is so smart it makes me want punch myself in the face out of joy). She performs a new kind of knowing, a phenomenology, a way of going that is at once physical and affective and exquisite.

And of my excellent friend, Marc Lafia, who's been making short films, long films, images, and experiences for 30 years and whose work has taught me what vision is and what technology is. He operates in this incredible space that always already considers the form of something, engages the form of something, while articulating it with an incredible intelligence and beauty.

And of my fellow rhetor, Lohren Green, whose Poetical Dictionary is one of the greatest contributions to literature imaginable — at once shifting the very terms of knowing, of speaking, of writing and doing it with the utmost grace and eloquence.

Or my favorite band, now disbanded, Here Are The Facts You Requested,who take on the entire history of pop music to create what they call avant-normal — incredible songs that interrogate the very nature of a song with every note.

Now I imagine writers, musicians, artists like this all over the world — this entire strata of outrageous brilliance hovering over this globe, a strata that rarely moves, that does not enjoy dissemination but that persists out of diligence and passion. When I imagine this, I am at once inspired and saddened — inspired by the thought that despite the overwhelming stupidity and ugliness of the world, there are these flares of brilliance everywhere; and saddened that I, and you, will never know them.

What Body Are We Breeding?

I know I've written and ranted about this before, but it surfaced in my mind and in my fingertips so here it is again, in a different form....

The obligations of the day blind us. We focus on waking up and getting ready, getting where we need to go, negotiating work and family and love and bills and traffic and taxes. It's not often that we afford ourselves the opportunity to survey the world, its mechanics and mode of operation. You'd think the media would help us with that but the opposite is true: the media focuses on current affairs, rarely stepping back to critique the system.

Step back for a moment now and look at the mechanics of the world around you. Look at what's demanded of the body, how its movement is choreographed throughout the day. It's quite odd.

Our jobs not only don't ask us to move — they demand that we don't move. We sit at desks for hours upon hours, staring at a screen occasionally getting up to drink some coffee or chat with a co-worker. A body that moves, that flexes its muscles, an active body: this goes against the very basis of the information economy.

Meanwhile, we feed this still body poorly. Obviously, not all of us: some of us take the time to pack a nice lunch, to eat well, to treat this stationary, withering frame of ours. But, on the whole, I think it's safe to say that Americans at their jobs are not only not moving, they're eating absolutely terrible food, gut wrenching food, soul killing food.

And drinking loads of lattes — antibiotic infused, hormone drenched milk fat with some shitty coffee in it.

This world is breeding a body that does not want to move, a body that is not physically vital. Sure, there are gyms, these ghettos of movement. But I'm not sure mindless, concerted movement breeds a healthy body. Watching tv while working an exercise bike ensures that we remain locked into the information economy, to the exchange of the new capital: images.

And so, as a culture, we are being bred to manipulate pixels and words, images and icons. Capital demands a new kind of body, one that doesn't need to lift or heave — and one that doesn't want to run about, fuck, frolic. The industrial age is truly over; the informational body is being born.

And it is not pretty, this birth, this metamorphosis, this breeding. It demands a disciplining of our days that is unsavory — waking to the shrill cry of the alarm clock, slouching through maniacal traffic, being forced to sit at a desk staring at a screen for hours upon hours.

Marcuse calls this the body of labor. But that's not quite right because the very nature of labor has changed — and this new labor doesn't want a body at all. It wants a brain that can fill in the gaps between machines, between computers. I want to say: it's the antibody of non-labor labor. But that's a supremely ugly phrase.

The body of pleasure is being bred out of existence, leaving us literally impotent, popping Viagra just to continue the species.

And the shitty things is, this whole thing is gonna come crashing down and we'll need to be strong, really fucking strong, to survive. But by then we'll be shriveled, mere husks left to be blown away by the mighty winds that come.

The Business Suit is Liberating

Ain't work cool? Why go home? Let's just keep working! All the time!

The jeans, t-shirts, and sneakers of today's work world are not signs of liberation. On the contrary, they mark Capital's success in co-opting every last vestige of personal life, folding our very selves into the will of production.

The business suit — a pain in the ass, no doubt, and rarely attractive — marks a clear line between home and work. It is a uniform that declares: "This is me at work. There is another me that is, frankly, none of your business."

In the old days, you couldn't get a job if your hair was long, your nose pierced, and tattoos covered your arms. Today, at least in San Francisco, it seems like a requirement. Capital realized that the maintenance of a personal life distinct from corporate life is not productive — for the corporation. All that wasted time making love to your spouse! All that wasted time reading, writing, strolling, thinking, eating drugs! You could be using all that time to write another PowerPoint presentation! Work, you drug addled freakazoid!

I watched it happen in San Francisco in the last 1990s during the dot com explosion. Suddenly, the work space was filled with bikes and skateboards and everyone was in t-shirts and jeans, tatted and pierced and, well, working their asses off. What a find for Capital! These little fuckers get shit done!

And the bars and coffee shops, filled with the same kids, became extensions of work. The cafe went from being a refuge from work to being the site of work. And thanks to microcomputing, we are always jacked in.

Now work permeates every aspect of the day, more or less. Every moment is a potential moment of productivity. Look at how the new corporate order functions. Google — and Apple and Genentech — bus their employees to work — oops, to campus. Now, this no doubt makes said employees' lives easier and reduces the dreaded carbon footprint. But, come the fuck on, can't we have some time to ourselves? And, once on campus — oh, the word creeps my shit out — you get free lunch! Just like in prison!

And we have foosball! And M&Ms coming out the yin yang! And, look, everyone's cool and wearing t-shirts and jeans! They're your friends! Isn't work great? There's no reason ever to leave — except that housing you is expensive so we'll bus you back to your over priced condo dorm — for which you pay a rent or mortgage that keeps you in a state of perpetual indentured servitude — before busing you here in the morning.

The genius of Capital is to have you identify yourself, once and for all, with the desire of Capital, to have your most personal selves be a source of productivity, of energy, for the capitalist engine. This is accomplished through branding, of course — "I'm a Mac," "I'm a PC" — but through an absolute identification with work, as well: employees wearing Google t-shirts.

This means we identify at once with production and consumption, the ultimate dream of Capital. It's an infinitely fast circuit — the kids working all day to make the shit, buy the shit (except, of course, for the real kids of the Third World — with them, we stick to good old fashioned exploitation!).

As our uniform stays the same from home to work, our privacy gives way to the Spectacle. Look at the modern office: no private offices at all. Even the conference rooms are all glass — so when you sneak in to make a call, everyone can see you. The open work space is the splaying of the private before the panoptic eye.

The suit that kept work contained in its office has given way to the bleed of denim and the continuous, always exposed, always-on work day.

The Radical Relativity of it All

So the other day I take my 7 year old boy to a skateboard event in San Francisco's Tenderloin — yes, that's the name of the neighborhood and, no, I didn't make it up — sponsored by the city Parks and Rec. The Tenderloin, for those of you that don't know, is one of the more, well, poor neighborhoods of the city — black, Laotian, Vietnamese, and more.

And then there was us — the beast and me, a middle class hebe and his demi-jew spawn. Oh, it was a beautiful, if chaotic, event — loud music, people everywhere, and some professional skater in the middle of it all. My boy, needless to say, was a bit intimated — he had his board and his helmet but he was sticking close to his pops.

Seeing such a young one — he was certainly on the younger side — people were coming up to us to encourage his participation. One such young man introduced himself as Kevin. Kevin was a 19 year old black man. He explained to us that he'd grown up in the SF housing projects and that skateboarding had helped keep him off the streets, out of trouble, and in school. So he suggested that I encourage my boy to skate — you know, to keep him off the streets.

But for me and the boy, skateboarding is about putting more street, as it were, into our lives. We're not trying to avoid trouble; we're trying to get into a little — just a little, of course.

And this brought to light the relativity of social issues — for one community, skateboarding is a way to stay out of trouble; for another, it's a way of welcoming some trouble where there is too little. This disparity makes making sense of social policy insanely difficult.

Take the so-called issue of drugs. I love drugs! My friends love drugs! My whole life we've been dropping, eating, smoking, and snorting so many different things. In other communities, for other people, drugs have been devastating, laying waste to entire populations.

How can we have a conversation, then, about the role of drugs in our society? And, more complicated, how are we to legislate it? The same act — smoking some crack, smoking a joint, blowing lines — means very different things in different communities. But the law must apply to all, equally — at least nominally. We know, of course, that it is not applied equally — that there is enormous racial bias.

And yet I like the idea of police being empowered to choose when to enforce a law and when not to. Because the same act is not equal for all. I know, I know: our police, unfortunately, are not trained to do that. On the contrary, they are trained — perhaps implicitly — to enforce along racial lines. But I'm asking you to listen to what I'm saying: the equal enforcement of the law does not always make sense, especially in a country as wildly diverse as this one. As legislation can't discern, it's the job of the enforcers to do so.

The grand finale of this skateboard event was the giving away of 10 boards to 10 lucky kids, courtesy of this pro skater. When they announced the beginning of the give away, all the kids raced to where the new boards were lined up. My boy, sensing the excitement and wanting a board, began his foray into the group — before Dad yanked his ass back. And I explained to him that those boards were for kids who couldn't afford their own and, as we can afford one, he had to sit this one out.

Because while the law may apply to us all equally, this doesn't mean we are all the same.

Image Life: The Screen Does Not Mediate

To see, Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues, is to palpate. It is akin to touch only capable of traversing great distances. I can only palpate with my hands those things in my immediate vicinity. But I can palpate things with my eyes that are tens, hundreds, thousands of feet away. It is odd that we might consider vision a cold sense, as if the spatial distance translated into a lack of affect or effect. How do I see something if my body is not touching it in some way? My eyes lay hold of it, take it up, weigh it, consider it, make sense of it in a way that’s different from, but akin to, what my hands do.

The digital camera and its extension — the interweb — is an extension of the eye, an amplification of its ability to palpate the world at great remove, across great distances. When we see an image, we may not have recourse to the other senses (although sound is a key aspect of the digital image) but the eyes are a quite powerful means of taking up the world. Imagine, for a moment, that rather than the eyes being extended, touch was and we could reach around the world with our hands and touch a person on the other side of the planet. Would we say the experience was mediated? Would we say the experience was not real? That it was “only” a grope? Why do we say this about seeing but not about touch?

When we interact in a chatroom with a woman in Romania; when we stare into the projected eyes of a stranger in Nova Scotia; when we discuss our deepest fears with a psychologist across town or across country: when we interact with these images, we move and are moved, literally. That is not a false encounter, a replica of an encounter. Nor is it a mediated encounter. It may not be the same as talking to someone standing next to you but the difference is not the difference between the immediate and the mediated, the real and the replica. Both are real. Both are at once immediate and mediated by our fears, memories, desires, language, eyeballs.

The point is this: the image is real, too, and makes for real encounters. Different than fleshy encounter but real nonetheless.

There’s a prevailing argument that this screen life, this image life, is alienating. Walk in a coffee shop, everyone’s on the computer. Wait at a bus stop, everyone’s looking down at a phone. Indeed, in the reviews of David Fincher's film, The Social Network, the most common comment was that the film articulates a great irony: a man with no friends creates a social network that’s supposed to be about friends. The implication is that Facebook friends are not really friends. Well, of course they’re not. A Facebook friend and a friend I see everyday, a friend I’ve grown up, are different things. Nobody every said they were the same thing. It turns out words have multiple uses depending on their context!

As for people looking down at their screens rather than each other standing at a bus stop, does this mean we are all alienated? Or might it mean we are connected to each other in ways that traverse immediate spatial vicinity? Everyday life turns in many ways who our neighbors are, on what’s happening directly in front of us. But this doesn’t mean we can’t also look down at our screens to see what others are doing across town, across country, across the globe.

Rather than looking at screen life as lacking something, as interfering with something, I’m suggesting we look at the communities it forges, the lives it makes. In many ways, screen life enmeshes the individual in multiple networks, in networks he or she might never have been a part of, to things and ideas and people he or she might never have known. The speed of the image reshapes and proliferates community.

And allows us to fold the world into a temporal origami. A friend in Thailand posts as he rises but we in California are fast asleep. I rise hours later, see the post, reply. There is, then, this very beautiful syncopated communication. Or, even better, this aparallel becoming, a moving with that is neither immediate nor mediated but that enjoys a strange temporality. We live in image time, in screen time.

The Will to Multiplicity

This or that book, they like to say, is the definitive tome on James Joyce, on the French Revolution, on Monet. But why be definitive? What will propels such a desire?

It seems such a peculiarly imperial drive — to claim the territory, plant the flag, make the laws: this is James Joyce, dammit! This will imagines knowledge as a domain to be colonized with texts that are fixed entities, quantities to be exhausted and hence known — as if knowledge had an end.

But what of the will to multiplicity? What of the will that says, "This is my take on Joyce. What's yours? The more the merrier!"

The will to multiplicity doesn't mean writing with any less rigor (although rigor of research wields its own very special kind of tyranny). Nor does it necessitate hedging its bet (although there's nothing wrong with that — hedging is a complex art and science unto itself). One who writes with such a will is no less passionate, no less engaged with the material than the one who seeks to be definitive. I might even say that the will to multiplicity enjoys a certain intimacy with the material, seeking to see it celebrated, proliferated, extended into new territories.

Just because I recognize that there are other readings doesn't mean I don't stand by mine. Why can't I be passionate, emphatic, about what I have to say while simultaneously relishing the fact that there are other passionate, emphatic readings?

A text — whether it's a book, an oeuvre, a life, an event — is infinite. There are as many ways into a text as there are readers and more. I want to say that a text is all of its possible readings, including those yet to come, including those we cannot yet imagine. The more readings — and the stranger the readings — the more alive that text becomes.

The will to multiplicity enjoys the lack of finality, the impossibility of reaching the end. It knows no reading can claim the land because there is no land per se: the whole thing is in motion, a river, an ocean, a sky. It does not seek to exhaust a text because there is no exhaustion — there is nothing but the act of reading, of reading again, and again, and again.

The will to multiplicity is premised on love — a love of the text, a love for and of and with difference. It is a love of life in all its multihued splendor.

On Generosity

What does it mean to be generous towards something — towards a book, an idea, a work of art, even a person?

It doesn't mean liking that thing. On the contrary, it means putting judgment aside in order to engage the thing, consider the thing, take it on, take it up. And what can be more generous than that? To consider something entails a certain intimacy, letting it play across you, with your ideas and memories, your blood and tissue and muscle. Generosity entails lending something else your body to see how it plays with your system, how it sets and where it settles — its speeds and intensities, its desires and drives, its shapes and trajectories.

And this means letting this thing have its way rather than making it conform to your pre-established ideals. Needless to say, you will make it conform to you. How could it be any other way? An engagement with the world is singular: this going with that, you going with that book, that word, that photograph. But this is different than making it conform before its had a chance to speak, before its made its way. The best reading is a co-operative event, you and thing together making something new: you take the thing somewhere it didn't know it could go and it returns the favor.

Letting something have its way demands great trust. And so this is another aspect of generosity: assuming the best from something. That is, rather than looking for how something fails, why it sucks, why you hate it, you look for what's great, what's interesting, what has possibility. Why spend your time, your energy, talking about something you don't enjoy, you don't respect? What a perverse thing to do! Generous reading seeks to proliferate a thing, make it as interesting and wondrous as possible! It doesn't reduce; it multiplies.

And, well, if you don't like something, put it down — stop eating, shut the book, leave the theater, click to another page. Life is too fucking short to spend it with shite.

Shed the shite! (Ok, ok: I'm a fan of Irving Welsh's, ergo, "shite.")

Does this mean there's no place for what seems to be negative critique? Does this mean you can't stand up every now and again and say, "This sucks shit"?

Well, I say: if you can walk away, walk away. Better to use your attention, your energy, your vitality on something that makes you more attentive, more energetic, more vital — on something that propels you in the healthiest, most robust fashion possible.

And for those things from which you cannot so simply walk away — things like capitalism — well, I say that in the spirit of generosity, try to make your critique as interesting and nasty as possible.