[Nettime-bold] Re: questions for 15 minutes (old mail from Rhizome)

[Nmherman@aol.com]

Subj:    RHIZOME_RAW: A Disjointed Reaction to the Genius 2000 Video 
Date:   8/7/99 12:43:49 AM Pacific Daylight Time
From:   fluxis@MEDIAONE.NET (INFOSLUT 2000)
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                 Revolution is fought in america no longer by riots
     or revolutionaries
             but by the individual in daily routines. It is not a
     political war and it is not a
             violent war. It is a war that achieves very real
     success by fighting
             with plastic water guns rather than bullets.

                 You can trace everything in recent American
     history to this battle within
             the self. The lack of self-confrontation. The
     Columbine High School
             Students were two boys demanding access in a world
     that had given
             access only to reebok and car commercials. Monica
     Lewinskys lips
             were the lips asking for access, and The Kosovo
     bombings were
             America's collective attempt to pretend its lack of
     access was
             tolerable.

                 But meanwhile as a collective the American agenda
     will not be
             changed by a woodstock riot or a new John F Kennedy
     Messiah. The
             change takes place in individual cognition. Genius
     2000 is not
             neccesarily looking for a group of zealots, more or
     less it is
             demanding that those who are not zealots ask
     themselves why not,
             and that those who are zealots ask themselves why.
     Essentially
             Genius 2000 is the derivitive of the classic belief
     that the
             answers to questions were internal, so long as you
     knew the
             questions. There is an almost imperceptably audible
     click when you
             know you've got the right answer or the right idea.
     Genius
             2000 is the attempt to question the foundations of
     those clicks, not
             to change the burned out lightbulbs over peoples
     heads, but to get
             them to realize that they're even there to begin with.

             A few things happened after watching the genius2000
     video.
             I went to a book store and picked up the beginners
     guide to Noam
             Chomsky.

                 Was it intentional, all the inclusions of people
     stating that y2000
             was not important to them, but they believed that the
     importance
             placed on it by others would make it important?

                 The importance of yhwh, the idea also of the 27(?)
     letter name for
             god; the original intent of which was to prove that
     god was
             unspeakable, creates a mass of zealots who instead
     dedicate their
             lives to the attempt to pronounce it [an act of
     violence against the
             ideology of sacredness- which seems to construct a
     relative idea
             of "location" as an isolated sacred
     moment/place/person. Which, in
             the wake of postmodernism- which is perhaps the last
     movement in
             the pagan non-secular religion of art- is to use that
     notion of
             "seperation" and apply to the whole, to "seperate
     everything" as
             sacred.]

                 The idea- "What if the year 2000 is the start of
     the world?" is a
             compelling one. Because we look at the state of
     hopelessness left by
             modern culture/religion/media, the idea of being
     displaced from the
             sublime and meaningful, all the idols smashed.

                 Perhaps the start of the world, stems from that
     hopelessness,
             perhaps the start of the world is the recognition of
     individual genius.
             We are forced not to rebuild a hope but to
             hope for the real, vs the intangible "after-death",
     paradise. That is
             perhaps the year 2000...or the revolution, or the new
     messiah,
             they are all a metaphor anyway, for "god" as we have
     lost him.

                 The idea of the millenium of paradise after the
     apocalypse...we
             could claim, spiritually, that the last millenium has
     been the first
             corruption of christianity [as in the original Jesus;
     the smashing of
             spectacle, the first true subversion of media [as
     Genius 2000 claims it
             to be, if we take that for granted- that the
     crucifiction was demand
             for access, then christianity as in vatican/pope was
     the first
             commercial declaration of, the first bastardization,
     its own
             subversion.] Then perhaps we are living the
     apocalypse, the
             bloodiest millenium the world will see. Perhaps the
     destruction of
             these false opiates which once provided hope is the
     true progress.
             The year 2000 holds the destruction of the dead soul
     as in the
             promise kept after death and the resurrection of the
     "living soul."

                 Perhaps we have lived with the idea of isolated
     events as
             sacred, certain people as genius, certain ideas as
     true, in order to hold
             that element of specialness, in order to remember what
     specialness
             is, and then to forget what, exactly, is special, and
     to create an
             "isolated everything" phenomenon.

                 The year 2000 is not the date set for the monolith
     to descend on
             mankind and elevate them to this state of mind. Rather
     its interesting
             to see projections of the utopia everyone wishes for
     but no one will
             work towards, as in, everyone knows what the messiah
     is, they just
             refuse to construct (or deconstruct?) it for
     themselves.

                 I hope this document spawns some feedback. I
     should hope to
             extend this dialogue far beyond the genius 2000
     sphere- which is
             integral for genius 2000 to remain in a state of
     becoming. Genius 2000
             is not an end all "movement," merely one chapter in
     the encyclopedia
             that documents the struggle for subtlety in the face
     of the obscene.
             Thats the schizophrenic nature of America.



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Date: Sat, 07 Aug 1999 03:31:53 -0400
From: INFOSLUT 2000 <fluxis@MEDIAONE.NET>
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