Post-pubescent rant

I am not a knight in shining armour. I will not sweep you off your feet. I don’t believe in picking up women. I don’t believe in women picking up men. Why? Because it’s violent. Acts of courtship – ‘picking-up,’ ‘hitting-on’ – are violent. If not, then they are manipulative: romance, allure, solicit, and so on. What of this? Why is it that two people cannot get romantically involved without abusing one another? Is there something inherently abusive in romance? ‘Fucking’ sure is vulgar, and it certainly seems injurious. ‘Sex’ on the other hand seems a bit more mutual. Does all of this have something to do with possession? Submission? We seize our partners; our partners submit. Do we submit as well? Are we seized? Is there such a thing as mutual seizure? Is this romance? My favourite romantic moments have been tranquil ones: cuddling on the couch, a long walk, a good laugh. I don’t remember any seizures. Where’s the hurt? Or is romantic violence violence without injury – even a welcomed violence? Do we all have some primal yearning to be abused? Abuse without pain? This doesn’t make any sense.

Perhaps we can distinguish a philosopher from an everyman by their will to act when in a state of confusion. The former simply never acts – this gives him plenty of time to figure things out. I’ll be single for some time – maybe some day I’ll actually get something figured out. This sux.

Did anyone else notice this?

"Hamas sweeps to election victory"

Is it just cause I'm young and only just now beginning to seriously pay attention and understand the headlines, or is the world coming together and falling apart more than usual these days? Anyways…

"Israel rules out talks with Hamas"

Cause once I was punk

New school

Stars - Set yourself on fire
(Up and coming Canadian indie band.)

Old school

Dwarves - The Dwarves are Young and Good Looking
(Did you know Nirvana used to open for these guys?)

Back to originality

I actually wrote this about a month ago during my dry spell with the intention of posting it later. Well now is later.

Maybe this time with a little more sense. I will return to my earlier discussion on originality, and bring up some further problems with the debates: ‘what is art?’ and ‘what is good art?’ There is a difference between originality and the original act, in my earlier post I argued that the latter was not possible, at least not in the traditional sense of the term ‘originality.’ This had to do with the need for originality to take its bearing off the origin. I concluded that an original act could only be, at best, an attempt at producing the mirror image of the median. I neglected to address the more obvious concept of the original thing, which is loosely, any thing produced, to which there is no thing like it in existence prior to it. The trouble with such a concept is that it is at the same time very possible, even necessary, and also utterly impossible. Possible in regards to the fact that no thing can be exactly like another thing, without being the other thing – and thus all things are inherently different and original. But in also in the same breath, no two things can be completely unalike, and no thing can be understood without referent to another, and thus it cannot be completely unlike. Thus a spectrum emerges on which we set arbitrary standards of originality. This spectrum itself is arbitrary in that it can only be assigned to attributes, but in order to be useful it also has to act as an umbrella over wider concepts. I.e. Painting A is black and there are many black paintings in existence, painting B is white and it is first ever like this; they are both paintings. Thus the colour attribute may be original, but the latter referent of the painting is not – in fact it is for all intention and purpose universal. There is also an arbitrariness in the use of time as arbiter: painting B being ‘the first ever,’ and any white painting produced after it will not be original by the same standard. But let’s return to the functional role of ‘orginality.’ Though I will not accept originality as any thing in itself, it may serve some useful purpose.

Let’s suppose a concept of time is necessary to a concept of originality. Thus, attributing originality also attributes a time qualifier. To be original is to be the first. If this is all originality is, then perhaps there is no harm in it. If we treat the expansion of human capacities normatively, and many do, then originality can be very useful (Expansion also caries a time qualifier: things can only expand over time. It also implies linearity.). In order for something to be the first, it implies that it was not there before; it is something else, something new, something other – a new boundary or an expansion in capacity. I have no problem with this use as long as we accept the validity of the normative assumption. But is the acceptance of a normative aim, the expansion of capacities, antecedent to art?

What of genuineness? Should an act that is genuine but not necessarily original, not be considered useful? Arguably an act could be artificial, inauthentic, un-genuine, and still be original. Should such a thing be accepted? Art isn’t mechanical or is it?

Afterthought: I feel inclined to want to tie this call for originality in art up with a modernity, and strategic rationality. Money is mechanical, and the assigning of monetary value to art creates a need for its mechanization. Maybe more on this later.

Where was I going with this?

No assembly required

Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to
secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor. Adam Smith.

People sometimes ask me why I call myself an anarchist. I think the above quote just about sums this up (I don’t like the "bourgeois kids"). I also happen to be against most forms of private property. Go figure. But recently I’ve been thinking: maybe 'anarchist' is too harsh of a word. The truth is I’m not as much an anarchist as I am a post-structuralist pomo windbag. I’m open to the possibility of the Other – that’s all – and it so happens that anarchism, the un-presence of law and state, is that other. This makes for a curious structural relationship between anarchism and the way things are. You see, absolute anarchism is, well, impossible. Thus, it will always by that intangible Other no matter how it's pursued and for whatever duration of time. I feel that it is just that – its impossibility and subsequent utter open endedness – that makes it so tantalizing. It is less a pursuit of some fantastic decided upon utopian dream, as it is an unwillingness to accept just such a notion. There is no narrowing of the imagination needed, nor any assembly required.

Quote of the moment

"Fucking bourgeois kids make me sick... so revolting i just want to vomit class warfare all over them." - me

The first thing I said to a close friend of mine upon seeing my ex-girlfriend's myspace account for the first time.

Consuming outside inside out

Check this out. Read it form top to bottom. It’s dead on. Authors Heath and Potter say what I’ve been trying to figure out since I was sixteen and a particularly critically minded teacher asked the class whether any of us could genuinely claim that we stood outside the mainstream. It all seemed so futile, no matter what you did you were always a part of it – even in being anti-mainstream, the mainstream held synonymous with consumer culture, you were still whoring yourself to some label or brand – you were still its progeny, you were still a consumer. In The Rebel Sell, the authors point out the error in conflating mass culture and consumer culture; we can’t set ourselves apart from the mainstream by merely consuming differently. Consumption is the dominant medium, and unless we’re willing to shed this, we are just a part of the dominant culture as the next poor dumb indoctrinated bloke. (Can we shed this? Are we fuct here by an ‘ought-to-actually-can clause’? Marx might cry out about the realization species being. Is this a shortcoming in Marxist analysis?) The ball is taken further, when they illustrate how our counter-mainstream consumptive practices only exacerbate the situation. Sigh.

Oh and I came to this link from a comment on this blog: Marginal Utility, maintained by author Rob Horning. This blog is extraordinary. I can only aspire to one-day write with the clarity and insight that Rob does on matters that seriously matter. Honestly, I came across this blog because one of his blog posts was an assigned reading in one of my classes.

emabrrassed

This is a little embarrasing, I havn't been posting much lately. Have no fear, I will be back, this month has just been a little strange.

How coumod are you?

On the cover of Critical Theory (1994), by Couzens and McCarthy is located a ‘striking’ etching by Francisco Goya. It depicts “a figure presumably the artist, asleep at his desk while monstrous creatures of darkness swarm about him. On the desk itself is written the title of the etching, ‘El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.’” The phrase can be understood as either, “The sleep of reason produces monsters” or “The dream of reason produces monsters.” In one instance, the failure to use reason produces monsters; in the other it is reason itself that produces monsters. They associate this juxtaposition with two historical frameworks of meaning: that of the modern enlightenment, which is aligned with the former, and the counterenlightenment, which is aligned with the later. What struck me upon reading the two interpretations was my immediate inclination towards accepting the latter prior to any further explanation. Off the top of my head I couldn’t even tell you what the counterenlightenment is. Perhaps this suggests that within me is a deep-seated distrust of reason. I wonder if this sentiment is apparent in others also. Could this be a nifty (over-simplified) way of distinguishing between the moderns and counter-moderns among us? (It should be noted that, according to the writers, the most widely accepted interpretation of the piece is the former.)