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"When we live in a virtual isolated space, every reconnection with the Real is, of course, something shattering; it is violent." (Žižek, Conversation 4: Tolerance and the Intolerable)

When I visited the tattoo parlour, the guy said to me, "and you know, there's very few things in this world today that you can do that are just for you, for yourself only, and a tattoo is one of them."

Headwork in the Garden

dead media advertising on dead media

what's the 21st?

On Silence, by Aldous Huxley

The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise [The twenty-first century is, among other things, the Age of Sound]. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire -- we hold history's record for all of them [Binary sound, social sound and sound of silver - we hold history's record for all of them]. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence [And no wonder; for all the resources of our digital technology have been thrown into the current assault against physically discrete media]. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes [That most popular and iconic of all recent inventions, the iPod is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated control can flow into our ears]. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the eardrums [And this control goes far deeper, of course, than the subject]. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but usually create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas [It penetrates the social, filling it with a babel of styles, blasts of pop or indie music, continually renewed tracks that bring no meaning, but usually create a craving for constant affective flattenings]. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ear, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego's core of wish and desire [And where, as in most cultures, the listeners support themselves by downloading the music for free, the sound is carried from the computer, through to the device, and back out again]. Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood-pulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose -- to prevent the will from ever achieving silence [Heard or not, reproduced over the laptop or in earphones, all digital music has but one purpose -- to prevent the will from ever achieving difference]. Desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination [Disequilibrium is the condition of discovery and ethos]. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving [The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive musical apparatus is universal equilibrium]. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its Divine Ground. [iPods are the manifest effort to extend and intensify the workings of that force, which (as all the folk have always known) is the principal cause of stasis and ossification and the greatest obstacle between the musical experience and its mobilisation].

aesthetics and history

Despite a sense of rigur mortis in its theorising, as if it were a static and pervasive phenomenon, the digital aesthetic has a history. Compare the compact disc and the mp3, for instance, both built upon the digital, but carrying very different forms of coding, sound, tactility, look. The fact that sound has 'detoriated' or at least been compressed in the 'advance' of the mp3 is interesting - whereas digital imagery is all about approaching 'reality' or at least something like 'clarity' or relief; more megapixels, sharper flat screen tvs, etc. etc. The disjuncture expressed in the progression of visual versus sonic digitality shows that there is no teleology in this history, but it at least gives rest to pre-digital nostalgia as if herein was petrified.

thrashed

I'd really like to write something substantial one day on the phenonemon of 'thrashing' or 'killing' a particular piece of music, when one has played it so much that you get 'sick' of it. Does this fact mean that such a way of listening is inherently consumerist? Or that all musics (mainly popular music) we find bring on this condition are necessarily or fundamentally consumables?

"Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: They become more enjoyable the more one has already engaged in them. Exactly the opposite is true of consumption. To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages."
(Jon Elster, philosopher)

Hmmm...

what chu waiting for

"Time is for white people"
(Erykah Badu, in Blender magazine, March)

"[T]he idea of modernity as modernization [sic] turns relations of space - relations between cultures - into relations of time, where the white man stands at the pinnacle of world evolution"
(Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, p9)

This ain't just some bullshit about 'island time'.

james bidgood

Regarding James Bidgood, federal Australian politician who took photos of a man threatening to set himself alight outside Parliament in protest of his parents' visa troubles. I have little to say on the issue of the photo itself and the ethics of the whole thing, but just find it interesting how the entire event was such a meta kind of media ritual - a ritual about the media within the media.

Says Nick Xenophon, Senator, SA Independent:
"You don't need a code of conduct to tell you whether you're being a jerk or not, and I think there's an enforceable code of conduct in place right now. And that is the media, public scrutiny - if you behave like a jerk you'll get kicked in the public arena, and that's what happened."

That's fascinating enough about what it says about the mediated public sphere and fourth estate etc, but even more interesting is how media is both judge and culprit in this event - able to take differing and even conflicting discursive positions according to how and where the event and its tail of happenings is reported. For the entire reason the photo was taken was because Bidgood has an innate sense of the fact that (news) media space is THE social-political space, in fact one might say he actually helped the protester in this sense. But then are the media culpable? What the fuck is 'the media' anyway?

bjork 'gets' medium theory

addendum to below

I suppose this is really about the issue of that gap between theory and praxis/action, assuming that ideology/culture whatever normally takes place in the latter but now looking at how it re-presents or reworks itself in the former.

In that Taylor article I mention, which is actually an interview with Srecko Horvat, Horvat ponders if, now that Žižek seems ineluctably attached to the cinema, that the theorist might make a film himself. Taylor kind of flippantly and uneasily himself replies:

It's not something that appeals to me in the sense that it seems reminiscent of celebrities in one realm trading in their cachet for a quick entry into another. I'm also not sure how easily Žižek's theoretical speculations about film could help him create the aesthetic article itself, but one of the few things I think you can say with any certainty about Žižek is that it's unlikely one of his films would be boring or predictable!

But in a sense he has kind of put up a barrier between thought - or theory, academic work, whatever - having some kind of import or, further, impact on everything outside of it. He is sticking to the notion of academic writing as some kind of sacred, untouched-by-ideology sphere, right? But then he mentioned before that academic, or rather 'intellectual', thought has effectively come to speak for the dominant order. Why wouldn't a thinker who is apparently much opposed to this - Žižek - reply be reinserting himself into the realm of the popular (which Taylor seems to outrightly hate)? There's got to be some kind of transfer for things to work. If Žižek can bring psychoanalytic theories to bear on films so well and so 'accessibly' in his readings of them, then why wouldn't he do the same - actually, complete that very project - and make a film? As the ultimate embodiment of reality? Would this have some kind of tramuatic/progressive effect because he is aware of the machinations behind it all and would thus be able to avoid them? Or would it be - Dogville-style, as he says - an attempt to still convince us of the 'magic' of cinema? Can it be anything else? Something tells me Žižek wouldn't like entirely 'demystifying' avant-garde works, no?

The problem is, I guess, is that for all his various ways of inserting himself into popular culture (even most literally in terms of the Žižek-in-diegesis moments of The Perverts Guide to Cinema) he actually most of everyone still relies on his ultimate separation from it. In this, though, isn't he performing the very mouth-piece of the order that he rails against?

don't support what you're trying to deconstruct

The worst kind of theory/action/thought is that which knows better and does it anyway. It's kind of the subculture thing.

Can't be bothered elaborating, but this might do for now:

"It's not that paper journals are Leftist or non-Leftist that is the problem. Rather my point
relates to the particular lack of reflexivity practiced by certain Leftist paper journals. Žižek cites
Lacan's distinction between Rightist knaves and Leftist fools. The knaves are the neoconservatives who act as open apologists for the existing system, whilst the fools are principled Leftists whose mode of criticism actually ends up supporting not subverting the system because it acts as a 'performative utterance'. Put another way, if one wants to criticize the existing order there's a danger that you merely adopt a pre-ordained role - much like that of the "baddy" in a pantomime. Everyone then knows their alloted roles in the performance and within this structure the established order can target its opponents with fresh resolve.
Žižek uses Benjamin in this context to distinguish between the attitudes exhibited towards the
dominant relations of production and within those relations (see footnote 2 of Love Thy
Neighbour? No Thanks!) He makes it clear that critics often explicitly condemn of a social
system/political structure but do so in such a manner that it fits the pre-existing frame (Žižek also relates this to Lacan's distinction between the enunciated content and the position of enunciation). One could add McLuhan's point that the medium tends to swamp the message and this is my key point about just some Leftist paper journals - they fail to account adequately for the significance of their position of enunciation, irrespective of what they are saying. It's not so much about the political content (although there is still this nagging irony that Leftist journals actively contribute to the exploitation of libraries) but more about being more self-reflexive - not too much to ask from intellectuals? Rather than seeking to label IJŽS Leftist or Rightist, I think it's more important to identify it as radical and unconventional in the same sense that Žižek is radical - his whole approach and methodology is reflexive and non-static."

- Paul A. Taylor, 'The Importance of Žižek's Thought'

I'm not agreeing with the dude really, just using him to remember what I mean.

representation

It's interesting how this word refers to both a particular model of communication and a particular form of politics, as if getting over it might have something to do with complicating both.

mtv's jackass

Remember? Of course you do - the pain, the scat, the skating, the public humiliation (of both public and actors).

Anyway, it's definitely ripe for analysis, has copped a bit already:

Chivers Yochim, Emily. 'From “Jackasses” to “Wildboyz”: Neverending Adolescence and (De)stabilizing White Masculine Power on MTV', Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, TBA, San Francisco, CA. (see also thesis)

Shanken, Andrew M. 'The Sublime “Jackass”: Transgression and Play in the Inner Suburbs'

Brayton, Sean (2007) 'MTV's Jackass: Transgression, Abjection and the Economy of White Masculinity', Journal of Gender Studies. 16(1): 57-72.

Shafer, Gregory (2005) 'Media and Men: The Making of a Jackass', Reassessing American Culture.

Need to look at - do these articles say 'all' there is to say on the subject? Do they consider its origins in skateboarding 'subculture' and its alternative media aesthetics? Need to consider the primarily physical/affective (and yes, masculinist) dimension from which both emerge, and why they emerged at particular time in history. Look at director cross-over (Spike Jonze), relation to magazines like Big Brother, movie spin-offs (most 'un-movie' movies ever), television show spin offs and pretenders (The Dudesons), the line between reality and 'play acting' (physicality/violence as a kind of flatline assertion of authenticity), homosocial tendencies inherent, etc. etc.

And another thing:

If 'the personal is political', then is the destruction/invasion of the male body some kind of politics?

(Applies equally to skateboarding; does it automatically circumscribe involvement to males? Well, to say this itself is prescriptive, as if physical inevitably = male - look at gender studies of skateboarding)

Which is another way of asking - is there anything good about it? Beyond the level of representation/critique?

skateboarder as flâneur

"Benjamin noted a contradiction at work in the figure of the flâneur, however - that, while he subjected the urban world to an 'individualising' gaze (ie., his own), he simultaneously assisted in the erasure of individuality by reducing what he saw to a series of statistical points" (Gelder, Ken (1994) 'Vampires in the (Old) New World: Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicals', Reading the Vampire)

"In this sense, skaters see the city as a set of objects. Yet cities are not things, but the apparent form of the urbanisation process, and are in fact filled with ideas, culture and memories, with flows of money, information and ideologies, and are dynamically constitutive of the continual reproduction of the urban. To see the city as a collection of objects is then to fail to see its real character. And this is exactly the failure one could say of skateboarding, which does little or nothing to analyse the processes which form the urban; instead, the phenomenal procedures of skateboarding rely entirely on the objectival nature of the city, treating its surfaces – horizontal, vertical, diagonal, curved – as the physical ground on which to operate." (Borden, Iain 'A Performative Critique of the American City: the Urban Practice of Skateboarding')

What the quotes say, really. Looking at the failures rather than utopian possibilities of skateboarding; need to be recognised and interrogated. Argument for more 'concrete' forms of urban transformation ie. skateparks? Problems with visualist description of flâneur abound; not really willing to take this further. But contradictions both quotes speak to are important...

touch

beyond subjects and objects; think in terms of connective worlds, neural pathways made manifest, etc etc

"We touch objects, and they touch us" [sic?] (Handbook of Material Cultures]

Dissolution? No, just beyond.

See(?):
Fisher, Tom (2004) 'What We Touch, Touches Us: Materials, Affects, and Affordances' Design Issues. 20(4): 20-33.