Funny or Die – We have food sometimes..

“Funny” becoming on par with “death” or “cessation of effort”?

The site is linked through Huffingtonpost.com– where I receive my news predigested and populist: anyone can participate, anyone can resist copy editing (they often do), and everyone can cull the chaff of the day’s news to find that bright, shiny, nugget of newertainment

BREAKING NEWS: Romney’s house broken into! Bobby Jindal sounds just like Kenneth from 30Rock! Iceland is a land of Vikings and that inscrutable tormentor of swans Bjork!

that the blogosphere can work with– it’s striving, certainly, and its after a certain kind of affect– but the stakes are, even absurdly stated– rather high. To not laugh is to not exist, apparently. A smirk is akin to a pulse, perhaps.

And so the news becomes something to craft, to experience as a sensibility, to strive after a sort of “mythmaking”. As a praxis, it has real political potential, so long as it can be opened up beyond snarkiness and insult.

Myth is invoked as a means of deriving usable values from history, and of putting those values beyond the reach of critical demystification (Slotkin)…

The usable values here are entertainment, clearly–a good laugh is always beyond rationalization– how dreadful to have your jokes explained to you, after all.

Absurd might be

on its way to sublime

Cancer and Content

What stunned so many people–citizens and wonks alike– was the rapidity with which the economic meltdown transpired. One day, Chairman Ben gathered some elected officials into a closet and delivered the blow: what you have on your hands is the imminent/immanent collapse of the entire world economy.

One wonders with rates of depression skyrocketing and consumer debt spiraling out of control—with entertainment figured as the obviously fake parading as the obviously real and the president (former) who violently attempted to force “truthiness” to serve as “truth” so horribly– Katrina, Rita, and Iraq–it seems as if this was all prophesized before, some how. The disaster is always either about to happen or has already happened– although we can never, as Blanchot writes, experience the disaster as it happens.

“Cancer” would seem to symbolize (and “realize”) the refusal to respond: here is a cell that doesn’t hear the command, that develops lawlessly, in a way that could be called anarchic.  It does still more: it destroys the very idea of a program, blurring the exchange and the message: it wrecks the possibility of reducing everything to the equivalent of signs.  cancer, form this perspective, is a political phenomenon, one of the rare ways to dislocate the system, to disarticulate, through proliferation and disorder, the universal programming and signifying power. (READ ALSO: a relation that is not dialectical appropriation or a move towards sameness.)..It is not simply death at work that cancer seems so singular a menace; it is a mortal derangement, a derancement more threatening than the face of dying, and which gives that fact back its essential trait: its way not not letting itself be accounted for or brought to account…” (87).

Metastasizing cancer

It sounds as if, depending on how ironically we’ve heard Blanchot, that he seems some subversive potential in the form of cancer– disruption is critical in opening up a space that can not be drawn into the flaws of systemic thinking, systematic violence. In the case of my disaster specifically, it’s the monotony and escalation of the disaster which is calling into to question the “reduction of everything to signs” and “dislocates the system”– disrupting the “universal programming and signifying power” inherent in the flows of global capital as a concept and a practice. It causes governments and citizens to draw back and to question our investments in economies both general and restricted.

Viruses and Form

Blanchot writes of literature: “As an interruption of the worldly temporality of power and possibility, the literary space holds the conditions for an experience of a “pure‘ language of disengagement. Literature is a -power of contestation” in as much as it is maintained as the negation of itself, and preserves this radical disengagement from questions of legitimacy: -literature is not only illegitimate, it is also null, and as long as this nullity is isolated in a state of purity it may constitute an extraordinary force”.

The virus seeks to hijack organisms’ cells to replicate its genetic material– over and over and over– and yet is not technically considered alive, (Seriously.) although it mutates and changes in response to surface proteins, environmental factors, etc.

The virus enforces confusion, compromises and complicates the boundaries between inside and outside. The virus also, when thought of more globally– epidemiologically– provides a kind of cognitive map for the sort of mess the economy is in right now–we can only know what’s happened when its happened and cannot really move to stop it by anything short of resorting to economic witchcraft. 

The cogs on the world go round and round, round and round...

Tthings are sent, sent, sent, altered, sent, sent sent practically instantaneously (see also: the otherwise inexplicable rise of the lolcat meme).  The Virus could be a better model for the sort of myth-making we need to do in this EmerAgency.

We do not repel the earth, to which, in any event, we belong; but we do not make of it a refuge, or even of dwelling upon it a beautiful obligation, “for terrible is the earth.” The disaster, always belated—the disaster, strangled sleep–could remind us of this, if there were memory of the immemorable. (Blanchot)

Völuspá

This is the moment of propecy– the foretelling of failure and rebirth. The Volva (coincidence: so close to the latin “volver” “to turn”)–

Volva: Odin, you’re going down. I know you gave your eye for knowledge, but now….I want to talk to you about the first man and woman.  Every doom has an origin. And I take the long view of things….

Odin: ::blinks the good eye::

Volva: ::shifts uncomfortably near the fire:: I’ll take that as a yes.  You want to hear about your upcoming demise

Odin: …If you don’t mind.

Volva: I can tell you about dwarves, too. A whole catalogue!

Odin: If you must…There is the matter about the blameless god who will be slaughtered…..

Volva:: Yes. He will. And it will be because the Gods hate him. And you, you will do nothing. And you, you will die–attacked by a wolf while your comrades are fighting.

Odin: And…

Volva: .::gasps::

Odin:: :blinks:

Volva: And the world will burn up. It will end. Except it won’t–earth will rise again from the sea. And the two last survivors will start over again.

::blinks, gasps: Oh my god….it’s a DRAGON..it’s coming..for….::drops in a dead faint::

Odin: ::looks around::

In the original text, the narrative ends with the Volva seeing a dragon approaching— even after the end of the Gods, there’s an end of the world. Even after the end of the structuring mythic narrative  and the foretelling of another world, in which the God is superfluous– such is the virtue and plenty—that will also face– at the very least— disaster. The failure of these myths is acknowledged from the outset– which is for me part of their power– the system is never total, there is no need attempt to think, however frustratedly, beyond the outside of the text and the system (like in Hegel, for example): the outside is already there, threatening the errupt into the chaos that the myth barely contains. The narrative breaks, resists closure–the speaker (Volva) is seized by her vision and can no longer speak. There is some speculation that the Ragnarok satisfied the need to make sense of the frequent volcanic eruptions in Iceland.

Wagner used the idea of Ragnarok in Gotterdammerung. One wonders how we will cope with this end of a world– the end of the Masters of the Universe (Tom Wolfe).

Not Solipsism Afterall

Blanchot  felt that Hegel’s dialectics were “limp” (Writing the Disaster 47): “What exceeds the system is the impossibility of its failure, and likewise the impossibility of its success..” (47).

Levinas argues that in The Phenomenology of Spirit when the subject journeys out on its great “Odyssey” of spiritual development, the big disappointment is that the subject will inevitably make a return– run into herself. And so, here, for me, as heady as my love affair with the media has been in pseudo-bastardized hegelian terms, all I’ve done is find the  recesses of my own belly button.

“Writing, since it persists in relation of irregularity with itself–and thus with the utterly other–does not know what will become of it politically…This indirection, the infinite detour which we try to understand as writing’s being, so to speak, out of phase or belated—as incertitude or change (and also as invention)– makes us unhappy.”

What “good” can my writing do?– but that’s not the reason why I’m writing. I’m writing because I have chosen to attempt to writing under the assumption that  the universe is not on some journey towards abosolute spirit–however evanescent– and that there is no single point to which we can fix our gaze and navigate by, metaphysically speaking.

the medium is the experience

‘The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalisation is the speed of light.”– Virilio, ibid.

Celebratory or destructive? Globalization in the blink of an eye.

Fiber optics our carrier pigeons and the image our broadsheets and missives: but the analogy breaks down when probed much further than that.. “A rose is a rose is a rose. And a universe is a universe is a universe”. Rather than incantation we now have trances– however we conceive of them in time.

How we experience the social, each other, and ourselves is in the process of radical alteration. I am uncomfortable even putting the last sentence in the passive voice– or the active voice. I don’t know how to parse out agency in this medium– be it individual, technological (how uncanny cyborbs are), or linguistic.

In the beginning (of recorded Western thought at least) there was the Word

And the Word was with God and the Word was God. (At least, God the father as such is synonymous with a metaphysical category. Before, according to McLuhan, our interior monologues were experienced as spiritual visitations rather roiling or stagnating “inner life”.

Through him all things were made;  (Certainly. You try thinking without words and see how far you get.)

cyborg eve: Blanchot argues that the writing of the disaster exists beyond teleologies, beyond a beginning and an end, making the above "origin" intellectually null, but affectively uncanny-- we are ourselves the sum of so much prosthetics....

without him nothing was made that has been made. (God represented a conceptual category– and thus a metaphysics–The Word has been supplanted by The Image and metaphysics with ontology. What does it mean to be a creature of Image? To experience life in an instantaneous intuitive flash rather than through careful, reasoned text? What do terms like progress and time mean when Experience as image is both so sped up and so dilated.)

Walter Benjamin quipped that “Books and harlots have their quarrels in public”– if letters to the editor blew his mind, how would he conceive of the public quarrels that now transpire in the blogosphere– that a politician would, for example, have to assert that she and not her daughter bore a child because of the collective electronic wailings in a hitherto unheard of corner of existence. What kind of public is a blog— where one both strategically reveals (often what the polite would call too much) and conceals (who are you, “on the other end” reading this as i write this?).

And for that matter, how does civic virtue inform these disclosures, revelations? Perhaps we are all now harlots, whatever that means now.

Wonkabout: The D.C. Guide. : Viking Music For Your Foreclosed Soul

Wonkabout: The D.C. Guide. : Viking Music For Your Foreclosed Soul

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Odin: Now I’ve bled my ABC’s

In the Eddas, a collection of ancient Norse myths many of which were recorded in Iceland, Odin learns the secret of writing:

everything is illuminated...

Wounded I hung on a wind-swept gallows
For nine long nights,
Pierced by a spear, pledged to Odhinn,
Offered, myself to myself
The wisest know not from whence spring
The roots of that ancient rood
…

alphabet ephemera for the palimpsest of the human eye

 

 

 

Know how to cut them, know how to read them,
Know how to stain them, know how to prove them,
Know how to evoke them, know how to score them,
Know how to send them; know how to send them…

From “Hávamál”– Stanzas 138-144.

Wonkette : Iceland, The Country, Basically Gives Up

Wonkette : Iceland, The Country, Basically Gives Up

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World Economies are not as well marked as the Cliffs of Moher