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).

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.

Blogging the revolution that won’t be televised?

The Icelandic Government has Collapsed… and then what? – A Letter from Icelandic Anarchists

Riot Police doused in Skyr-- the very Icelandic dairy product Colbert denounced!

Quotes:

“The Icelandic Government has collapsed and some people talk about a revolution. In a way it is true. Ordinary people overthrew this neoliberal government by writing articles, holding speeches, noise demonstrations, bonfires, car horns, direct action, civil disobedience and minor sabotage. A nation that before had hardly put up any resistance to abuse of power for a long time, finally stood up and said: “No thanks! No more shit!”

And yet…

“These ideas [that one of the parties or a coalition of parties more liberal than the recent neo-cons in power can do good]  have one thing in common, they are all based on the idea that reforms inside the current system are steps in the right directions, steps towards a more just society. They do not demand radical changes – revolution. Therefore it is strange to see people standing on Austurvöllur (the square in front of the parliament) shouting slogans like “Long live the revolution!” – no revolution has taken place apart from the fact that the government has collapsed.”

Gil Scott Heron’s words come back to me as I think about the possibility of revolution in the experience economy– what would an electrate revolution look like, anyways?  That Gil Scott Heron’s words are no longer literally true makes me as sad as realizing that about a third of my music collection is electronic–not even a pretense of a human artist in the sense it’s usually meant.

more about “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised-…“, posted with vodpod

Colbert on Iceland or, Has anyone got change for a paradigm?

Stephen Colbert: On the disaster in Iceland

Highlights, because I can’t get the video to embed properly:

“Yes, they may have free health-care, a 99.9% literacy rate, and more clean, renewable energy per capita than any country in the World, but [dramatic pause] they also eat skyr.” 

Although overlooked in the economic armageddon of late, one of the more interesting facets, for me, of the meltdown has been the ways in which gender and sexuality have, somehow worked their way to the fore. 

A probability map for electrons in a Hydrogen atom

As the “Stephen Harper” quip in the clip may indicate, there is something about socialism that is read, satirically or otherwise, as effeminate: to fail to perform or enact free-market capitalist policies is to “be” a real “man” (or woman, if we’re buying into Butler’s arguments that discrete genders are intelligible when one presumes a heteronormative matrix). I wonder what it will mean to be “gay” or “straight” or “Icelandic” or “American” when so much of our time online problematizes notions of time, place, and “self”/”being”/”interiority”: just look the jurisdictional morass opened up by trying by taxing online activities- or only gambling:

“… categories equal metaphysics: what is real, and hence what constitutes problems and solutions, are relative to the apparatus. Or, as Thomas Kuhn said about paradigm shifts, a new paradigm does not solve problems of the old paradigm, it just makes those problems irrelevant” (Ulmer, Electronimc Monuments, 99).

If identity politics are  vexed by this new apparatus  (online, no body knows you’re a robot, a tomato, or a node in the worlds largest fungus), then why is gender/sexuality asserting itself again and again in American representations of this country’s meltdown? Why does this help us mythologize this disaster in a way that’s useful to us? And what kind of “use” are we looking to derive from it?

Yggdrasill

Humongous Fungus A New Kind Of Individual

ScienceDaily (2003-03-27) — The world’s biggest fungus, discovered in Oregon’s Blue Mountains in 2001, is challenging traditional notions of what constitutes an individual. The underground fungus–estimated to be between 2000 and 8500 years old–is also deepening our understanding of the ecosystem, with possible implications for the management of Canadian forests, according to a paper by the discoverers.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030327074535.htm

The Internet

The Masks of Odin by Elsa-Brita Titchenel

Copyright © 1985 by Theosophical University Press. All rights reserved.

“In the Edda, the Tree of Life is named Yggdrasil, apparently for several reasons. This is another of the ingenious puns the bards of the Norsemen used to convey their message. Ygg has been variously translated in conjunction with other words as “eternal,” “awesome” or “terrible,” and also “old” or rather, “ageless.” Odin (4) is called Yggjung — “old-young,” equivalent to the biblical “Ancient of Days” — a concept the mind can grasp only in the wake of intuition. Yggdrasil is Odin’s steed or, with equal logic, his gallows, the implication being of a divine sacrifice, a crucifixion of the silent guardian whose body is a world. In this thinking any Tree of Life, large or small, constitutes a cross whereon its ruling deity remains transfixed for the duration of its material presence. While Yggdrasil may refer to a whole universe with all its worlds, each human being is an Yggdrasil in its own measure, a miniature of the cosmic ash tree. Each is rooted in the divine ground of All-being and bears its Odin — omnipresent spirit which is the root and reason of all living things”

The banquet where people may starve…

Translates to "Free Food!"

Throwing away food to make a point, even as the price      of food skyrockets on a tiny, frigid island

improvised cannibalism as a figure of protest…to press a     point a bit  too far?..Is that possible? Eating is a social         act

certainly. Who you eat with, how you eat might be a useful, albeit informal  way to read the place of the family unit, even the larger social unit: how lonely is it to eat alone, even when there are people around you?

A young girl can choose between cannibalism and waste….choses hunger for the time being