Nmherman on 22 Feb 2001 15:12:45 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] Fwd: Essay for Netochka Nezvanova, February 1, 2001 |
- To: NHerman@hga.com
- Subject: Essay for Netochka Nezvanova, February 1, 2001
- From: Nmherman@aol.com
- Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2001 01:35:52 EST
- Full-name: Nmherman
++ The Wedding "Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore, In thy large recompense, and shalt be good To all that wander in that perilous flood." ++ The most important question for every writer is of course what to write. This question concerns many writers off and on through the course of their careers. Often one knows exactly what to write, and thus discovers the Muses, or Eumenides, who in the Oresteia were transfigured out of the Erinyes or Furies of Vengeance by Athena, in order to preserve democracy itself. For the US writer, things are even more mysterious. After all, we are doomed to chronicle the rise, corruption, and fall of US democracy. All the false tales of our purity and grace are of course baloney. In this respect the entire tragic structure is denied us. Some soothsayers have prayed to a floating feather, thus framing it and reading as you go. That type of tomfoolery is no longer humorous to my point of view. Rather decadent, in a beaureaucratic erosion-of-ecosystems kind of way, and not suited to the questions of those writing without any Aristotelian ground to stand on. The Europeans call for Proscenium VR, an absurd call for quiet over the engines of destruction. We are dying, we are all of us dying, and we don't even know it, but that's OK. Proscenium VR, even if we achieve it, won't bring back any authority at all to the US writer. The muses, so to speak, aren't connected to us any more. Or, you might say, they aren't connected to us yet. In either respect, it is hard to reconcile any talk of democracy with the US. Therefore there is a lot of slumming in all cultural professions. Go along, get along. It is as if we were photocopying images of pieces of pre-arranged blueprints and selleing the copies bound and sealed. No design, per se, is possible without communication and Wines has confirmed the crisis of communication in postmodern architecture (James Wines, De-Architecture, 1987). The slumming occurs as the larger group seeks to erase any sense of backstabbing among the chosen professionals. Too much internal violence will cripple any organization. Design becomes frozen in complacency and repetition, which is already evident in the advertisement as cultural recycler and hence as both sanitation and environmental protection. The professions cannot afford to debate the issues of loss of democracy because they are committed to its preservation, not its resurrection. The loss of democracy cannot even be discussed, much less addressed. This is unfortunate precisely because it nullifies the Euro prescription and leaves the subsequent talk or toil even more dystopically absurd. The proscenium will never come back, US democracy will never come back, US claim to cathartic art will never come back; these are lost conditions and can never be returned to. The US Constitution proclaims "no slavery," in its announcement to refuse taxation without representation. But profit is dependent on slavery and hence became a forbidden topic. We cannot allow ourselves to be prevented from accenting the "no slavery" origins of the Constitution, especially when the great document of the twenty-first century--money itself--remains to be written. The US constitution ought not to be read as "no writing," but as "no enslavement of non-writers by writers." By reasoning like this we can arrive at a new image of democracy and even a vocabulary of image-formation that will resurrect the non-slavery spirit of the Constitution. Of course the US government will not survive in its current two-party system (diverse only nominally); the new party will curtail expansion of US coercion until the no-slavery subtext of the Constitution becomes enforceable again. Good For Language Theater is almost a frame for verbal expression. It would be, were it not that the environment was fundamentally averse to any naive concepts like framing. Theater isn't a frame at all, in fact. This has been confirmed for musicians, particularly those who, like Petersburg's unhappy Yefimov, are unable to subscribe to a financial definition of ability. Theater is more like an empty box. Who would hang an empty box upon the wall? Very few. Theater is more like Blake's virgin's ear, "a maelstorm to suck things in." A passing kind of phenomenon ill-suited to architectural interpretation, especially in times of artistic dormancy in the housing of institutions. The proscenium is what is fought against, as we see in Alcestis, an unkind punishment averted only through blind luck. Heroism gone political--genius applied to social factors--brought the carefully described power of ancient Greece to a halt. This is only apparent if one tries to resurrect ancient Greece as a living ecosystem. As ruins only it confers the dubious honor of eternal proscenium. Professions, thriving as they do on insoluble approaches to problems, pursue the ruin-recording of a dead democracy as if it were in itself a worthy occupation. This is the error of backward thinking. After all, you can't look at Greece through the image that killed it, can you? That would be folly and inhospitable to say the least. No, the only way to realize the life of Greece is to see its remnants in all living things. Errors such as slavery are best relegated to obsolescence. I am sure this is what Euripedes would tell us if he were alive today. Fortunately, the doctrine of no-slavery is a perfect compositional adornment for the reconstitution of money as such. We need not convert heroism into politics, because it is within us to conceive of satisfying alternatives. Aristotle should be a lesson in organizational management, not in hygienic public relations. The no-slavery doctrine, as if by a stroke of fate, does not suffer under modular composition. The proscenium turns out not to rest on us like a curse after all. The curse is to live without it, to see the fresh and new in every gorgeous day, and to walk unenvied by the gods. "For he is a jealous god" won't ring as a threat anymore after the peaceful conversion from disastrous to sustainable production is made. If modular composition be our only gift, though reward in conscience only, it heralds the loss of many former securities. Chief among these is the legitimacy of consent. Slavery having evolved into taxation and further into consumption, consent is in ironic jeopardy. For the disappearance of consent is the unhoped-for side effect of the cumulative value required to sustain expanding monetary institutions. By conflating modular composition with universal privatisation of wealth, the ability to write money declines in proportion to the expansion of financial reach. Consent disappears and the no-slavery potential of any extant legislation withers on the branch. The recombinant value of life, or in this case, the artist's profession, is lost with the enforcement of financial law. Hence Yefimov dies in hope of a reconstituted talent-system that he himself never learned to express. The martyrs do not leave indulgences but curses, and just as the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the sons even unto the fifth generation, the US will have to resurrect the modular composition of money very like the Russophile will have to observe the cognitive caricature of genius. There's no other way out while law is necessary and immodular. Life has to work with life, and not empty promises. This tells us consent is almost a return to life; in matter of fact it is. Ignorance of how to express or register consent is the loss of life that urban financialism inflicts on the contemporary writer. A wedding is a simple image of consent despite the bulk of evidence to confirm its use as a tool of slavery. Perhaps it is significant that slavery now goes about dressed in the robes of marriage. Marriage is one of several barriers to the writing of money in the twenty-first century. Rather than trample an already ashen effigy, let us visualize some image of consent which does not arouse feelings of parricide. The image ought to begin as innocuous and without taint as possible. In fact, modular composition provides another mystically apropos option. For is it not clear to all that consent requires modular composition? It's frightening our civics teachers haven't stumbled on this one. Perhaps they fear the porous properties of a modular composition used on universities. Either way, the image of the wedding as modular can resurrect the previously extinct phenomenon of consent. This resurrection will only be "artistic" if it relinqishes all ecosystemic goals to simple financial careerism. An ecosystem of consent is a dangerous substance now bred only in labs. However, it must survive if the future is not to be surrendered to the coroner and the estate tax. Consent, like genius, once out of the bottle will blot out that which has gone before. The dangerous step must be taken. End of part one. ++ Refs: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/lycidas/