A Quick Thought on The Sufficiency of Language

Artists, musicians, dancers, mystics have an inclination to return to the insufficiency of language. Words, we are to understand, fall short — they can't possibly express the infinite complexity of the world, of truth, of experience.

But that is to assume that language is a vehicle of designation and not a body of performance.

Language — like music, like the human body, like paint — is something to be reckoned, something to move with. The writer must learn the possibilities, must develop the skills to put words — and language — to work, to have them entice and twinkle, provoke and titillate, to have words be an active force resonating in and through and amongst bodies and ideas and emotions and things and moods.

Words are gestures, just as moon walking is a gesture. They operate in, on, and with the world.

What's tricky about words — as distinct from paint and dance and sound — is that words have a more intimate relationship with concepts. But rather than this making words insufficient, it is precisely what makes words sufficient. Words at once name and do, think and act, designate and perform.

The operator of words must have mad skillz to operate this complex engine. Don't blame the words for their insufficiency. Blame the writer.

Things Teach: An Excerpt from "Reading the Way of Things"

A thing teaches.

A tulip offers a way of standing in the world, on one’s own without being excessively stern.

Grass instructs us how to be a network of individuals.

Certain tequilas — usually blanco — have taught me the way of difference, offering multiplicity without unity while teaching that sun and leather and grass and heat can play well together in the mouth. The different tastes do not cohere into a common cause, as bourbon often does. Each flavor maintains its local integrity while nonetheless working with the others. Every sip is not only astounding. Every sip is an education.

Here’s a list of things Uni — raw sea urchin gonads — has taught me:

1. All is becoming.

2. The most discrete domains house infinite variation.

3. Limits need be neither hard nor fast.

4. Embrace ambiguity.

5. Self-possession comes through flexibility.

6. Experience is everything—life is a how, not a what.

7. The skank of life is often delicious.

8. Be discerning—a life well vetted is a life well lived.

9. Eat the world.

10. Let the world eat you.


To the keen reader, everything offers its own science, its own knowledge. A thing is a pedagogy. The world brims with different ways of going, different ways of making sense of the world, different ways of going. We don’t just heed human ways.

In fact, perhaps we need inhuman ways to teach us fundamentally different ways of going. We need the saguaro cactus to teach us to go slowly, boldly, in the sun just as we need the oak to teach us how to be majestic and generous. We need the flow of the river to teach us speed and cooperation with the land. We need clouds to learn to drift softly; cats for their relentless attentiveness; dogs for their loyalty; the wind for its vigor and swirl. Everything is a possibility. And even if we don’t go like this or that — like a cat, like a cloud, like a river — we can take pieces of these becomings, we can come to know the world more intimately, we can be stretched and folded and extended. We can learn to go, and to go interestingly, to go curiously, to go delightfully: to go well

The State of Things, as I see it: Notes on Capitalism as Virus

These were notes from a talk I gave on capitalism. For some reason, I am publishing them now.....


By capitalism, I am not referring to an economic system, as if financial models are something we can pick and choose. This, in fact, is one of capitalism’s techniques of hiding itself: it propagates the lie that it is an option, something we choose rather than something we are.

When I say capitalism, I am referring to a complex economy of desire, inter-personal politics, and capital. As an economist knows, the ebb and tide of markets have as much to do with the irrational laws of human behavior as they do with the supposed laws of markets. I work in branding and this is what we do, what we are hired to do: to navigate the economies of desire for capital.

If you’re having a problem w/ my word choice, I ask to put that aside for the moment and listen to what I have to say,

What I want to suggest is that capitalism is a virus that infected the human host long ago and has at once mutated and caused mutations in its human host to the point where it is very difficult to distinguish virus from host. And that this virus has mutated quite rapidly over the last 200 years and seems to be accelerating replication at an ever-increasing rate.

Why a virus? Because, like a virus, it seeks solely its own replication: it is not just a call for “more” but a call for more of the same, more of me. As such, it is a virus of quantity that, in order to replicate more effectively, seeks the eradication of qualitative states of being, affective experiences.

And, as a virus, capitalism will exterminate its host — viruses are not smart that way. As William Burroughs says, any quantitative system will eventually annihilate itself as it exhausts its environment.

Speed and replication: these are the dominant behaviors of capitalism.

The present economy moves at incredible speeds and is accelerating. The human body, the host, slows things down. In particular, the human propensity for pleasure slows things down. Humans are desiring machines: we enjoy the world. We seek pleasure. And pleasure is slow.

And so we are witnessing the extermination of the human body and, specifically, if its will to pleasure. Let’s look at our lives:

-First, the virus seeks to own time. Be at work, everyday, by 9:00. Leave, if you’re lucky, by 5, 6, 7. The work week is getting longer thanks in large part to technologic mutations and always-on micro computing. The majority of your waking time is accounted for — and accounted for being productive, for producing more capital.

-Of course, there will be no fucking at work. In fact, it’s against the law: there are elaborate rules and regulations and training sessions to ensure that not only don’t we fuck, but that we don’t even discuss fucking — or even look at each other with the desire to fuck. Why? Because fucking is pleasure and pleasure is slow and unproductive.

-While at work, we are not allowed any privacy. Work spaces are now, for the most part, open. No chance to sneak a wank — or even pick your nose, exercise, stretch, no chance to enjoy private indulgences. Even bathrooms are rarely private: we piss and shit in front of each other. There will be not space, no time, for private pleasures.

-We sit all day at work in front of a screen. We no longer need bodies that can lift and haul and operate; the information economy wants a brain to do the computing that computers cannot. The body gets in the way.

-We eat at our desks. And what do we eat? Wraps from Wendy’s: fat and processed corn and soy to ensure we are never feeling healthy. Why? Because a healthy body wants to fuck.

-When we get home, things are no better. Both husband and wife must work now: more more more more. So both are exhausted and dehydrated from their day. The kids are wiped out from being abused at school — made to sit in chairs and memorize nonsense. It is not a pleasant scene.

-So we pop Valium and Xanax and Ambien to sleep. Which makes us groggy and stupid and dehydrated.

-So we wake up — gotta wake up good and early and get the kid to school and yourself to work — completely exhausted. Enter: Coffee and the Starfucks conspiracy. Why is there a Starbucks on every corner in downtown America? Because capitalism demands we work and we are so fucking tired so we neeeeeed caffeine.

-Only we don’t really drink caffeine; we drink Lattes Grandes: high powered coffee dumped in a vat of antibiotic soaked milk fat. Which makes us sicker.

-The rise of coffee shop culture in America is not the rise of leisure and pleasure: it’s the spread of capitalism. Coffee shops in this country are places to work, laptops out and ready.

-And so we have become an increasingly impotent society. Which is the goal. But we still gotta breed — cloning is not up and running yet — so we have to take a pill. Doesn’t it bother anyone that there are ads for impotence all the fucking time? The signs are not subtle.

-Schools have been taken over as well: adolescence and youthful desire must be turned towards quantitative production. So high school students don’t fuck: they join after school programs so they can get into college.

-Once in college, they are recruited, No more taking acid, reading Nietzsche, and having orgies. Now it’s Adderall and internships. The majority of college students major in business.

-Acid has been eliminated. What else do I need to say?

-Of course, we can’t just eliminate pleasure. And so capitalism substitutes consumption: we consume, relentlessly. This drives the will to more: produce more, consume more, on and on and on. There is no delectation, just consumption.

-This virus is aggressively mining its host. The first thing it needs is not fossil fuel but human vitality — as in the matrix, it needs our energy production. The environmental movement is, for the most part, part of the capitalist engine that keeps our eyes on fuel rather than humanity itself. We create green cars. Green cars! That’s insane! There’s no such thing. You know what a green car is? It’s called your feet.

-Is there a cure? Is there resistance? Capitalism is very good at infecting resistant bodies incredibly quickly. It folds whatever emerges back into what Guy Debord calls the society of the spectacle. John Lennon’s Instant Karma sells a bank; Vincent Gallo sells Vodka. No sooner does resistance emerge than it is turned towards quantitative production and consumption.

All is lost. Head to the hills. Find the scraps of land still left, set up camp, and fuck and fuck and suck and read and draw and fuck some more because the end is neigh, dearies. There is no cure.

Bad Lieutenant: Ferrara's Keitel vs. Herzog's Cage

Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutentant is one of my favorite films of all time. It is mythic, epic, all Keitel wrestling his demons, his sins. That is what the film gives us: a reckoning. Keitel knows he's a sinner and in decline. The film is Catholic, a tale of sin and redemption. To wit >>

I love Herzog and was, to say the least, surprised that he was the one to direct a remake — if we can call it that — and with Nicolas Cage. Odd. And what we get is a very different take on extreme behavior, on drugs and consumption. Rather than sin, we get excess and madness. This is Herzog's world where everything goes to the limit and beyond.

Herzog's film is a mess. And this, alas, is what makes it enjoyable — when it is enjoyable. The film careens, much like its titular bad lieutenant. And, amidst this wired, stoned meander there are some truly surprising and hilarious moments. When he holds a gun to two old ladies in a nursing home — his gun is enormous, an on running gag — and tells them that he should fucking kill them because they are everything that's wrong with America, he is not the insane one. In fact, it's one of his most lucid moments. And hence a truly complex scene.



And the film, admirably, never falls into a pat answer for what drives this character. He does not have a heart of gold. But he is not just a selfish asshole. He's mad, much like the film.

The fact is, Ferrara's film is a masterpiece — a nearly perfect film, if there is such a thing. And Herzog's is a mess. But, in this mess, there is something strange and beautiful.

Tequila, My Love, My Lifeline, My Teacher

For the spirit I sing of is a life giver, a life affirmer. Unlike all other booze, tequila is a natural upper: it makes you high, not sloppy down. With tequila, you don’t feel drunk; you feel, yes, high. Really. So be careful. A long time bourbon drinker, I began to find the weight of whisky too much for my increasingly fatigued frame. And so I reached for a lighter elixir and found it in the strange, heady brew of the agave…

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Secreting Being Seen: On the Glandular Production of Jennifer Locke

The work is physiological, muscular. There she is, dressed in latex and jumping rope for 30 minutes. There she is, letting loose the sweat and piss from her suit. And now there she is, naked, pouring water over her head. Another time, it’s glue that forms a second skin. There she is — or there they are — wrestling on the mat, flailing, breathing hard. There she is, branding some guy. Meanwhile, images and sounds — mics are often placed within the heart of the event, amplifying the aural intensity of the exertion — are exuded along with the sweat.

The mechanics of technology seem to fit seamlessly with the mechanics of the body. The camera, as Marshall McLuhan argues, is an extension of the body, a prosthetic of a sort. But in this case, it’s as if Locke, with all her physical prowess, is so virile that she’s developed this incredible appendage, like a super hero: a camera that can project her.

There is indeed something distinctly machinic about Locke’s work. Look at her there: she’s drawing blood from one arm and injecting it into the other. She makes technology — syringe, video — continuous with the mechanics of the body. Her work enjoys the temperature of the machine — cold as steel and scorching hot from churning. Her performances — and her images — are not emotional. There are no words; there is no dramaturgy, no acting, no histrionics. She does not dabble in human affect but in human mechanics.

This is not to say her work is not affective. It is. But this affect is not the affect of sentiment per se. A lot of art is splendidly rich in sentiment (without being sentimental). Indeed, most art does precisely this: it arranges affective experience without falling into sentimentality. I think of John Cassavetes’ films which drip affect yet rarely, if ever, succumb to emotional cliché. He rocks us with the power of affect.

Locke is not such an artist. Her work does not explore or deploy the gamut of human emotions. Even her punk sentiment — there is a clear creep-you-outness — is devoid of punk romance. For all the grotesquerie, this is not flipping off the bloody queen.

Locke’s performance is visceral but it is not a spectacle of viscerality. She will not allow a voyeurism that keeps seeing off stage, the viewer shrouded in the safety of darkness. This is not theater. Locke’s work performs the very viscerality of vision as she folds the act of seeing into the body of the work.

She doesn’t do this by forging a network that the viewer completes, à la Yoko Ono. She doesn’t do this by distorting vision, à la Olafur Eliasson. She does something much stranger. She takes up the act of her being seen and splays it, sprays it, along with sweat. Locke works vision itself through the techno-physiologic mechanics of the body, a body that doesn’t as much project images as it does secrete them.

Her image production is glandular. Which is to say, the images that emerge are not solely a muscular endeavor, a summoning of bodily strength that emanates via her prowess. Her body absorbs our gaze, filters it, then plays it back at us. Locke creates a living machine that takes in, takes up, the act of being seen, runs it through its endocrinologic system, and then secretes it. In her hands, the camera is not just a muscle or ocular prosthetic; it is a gland that processes the world. Yes, camera as gland: a potent, delicate magical box that takes up the world and, miraculously, secretes it anew, inflecting the whole (think: adrenaline.)

Her camera-gland takes up the viewer’s viewing of the scene — the seen of the scene — making it part of the performance, a marbling engine that entwines our gaze with her flesh. The camera does not mediate our experience; our seeing is constitutive of the performance. We see seeing. The projection of images — the seeing of this event — is continuous with the bodily mechanics of both performer and performance. We don’t just see Locke and her co-performers sweat; we see them secrete images. We see them secrete the act of being seen.

It’s as if her camera-gland has taken up the viewers’ eyes, taken up the very event of seeing, done what it is glands do, then secreted this viewing along with her other secretions — her sweat and blood and breath. The seeing of this event is digested, run through the mill of the body’s dynamics, and then regurgitated, sweated, bled back into the viewer’s eyes. As image secretions get in our eye, it makes us see — not just the bleed of life but the seeing of the bleed of life.


See some for yourself >>

A Less Bloody Ethics: On True Blood

This is what True Blood is about: the impossible calculus of human relations. The show does not offer a fixed moral stance; there is no right and wrong. There, are, however, clear limits of decency: pure vampirism is frowned upon.

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