the 5th Season

Well,

I got to stay in the house formerly owned by the krystal magnate this weekend.  hows that for shitting where you eat?

I'm back in the land of vayne temporarily too, thanks to the multidimensional generosity of tron, and a little help from listron as well.  It marks a big seasonal shift: i may go so far as to calling this years first day of ..... THE FIFTH SEASON!   I know. both difficult and quite easy to imagine.  here's to jerobaigm, scything it out in the lower hemisphere, clockwise though, in accordance with the almighty coriolis effect; closest thing to jesus i've yet seen.  here's to wilbur noting the maiden of the fifth, that girl whose eyes find a vanishing point far closer than ours... the fifth season is upon us and i hope you have your flame lit.

I guess nobody wants to get into the last two postings... I keep getting comments on the older one, so I guess I'll try to get into those.

Thanks to wilbur and Nick for getting into the sticky brown with me for longer than a soundbyte...  I'll try to honor them now.

Lifestyle...

This really gets down to the business of performative inscription.  At this point, we are so much a displacement of mediums rather than manifestations of anything pure.  Purity seems to leak out in discription when someone displaces a medium so thoroughly that any observer can no longer refer to anything else for comparison.  When Kyle publicly drank his own urine, he did this... quite well.   The displacement breaks the social agreement and makes "new meanings."

Well.  I guess a lifestyle would have to be a grouping of modalities or methods of expression that are meant to be read by others.  This presupposes that there are groups of people who are equipped to interpret your life in terms of a body of choices.  The fact is, in our late state of capitalism, this is pretty normal.  We allow observers to create our meanings for us via open analysis. In fact we relish it.  We begin to create our meaning, or at least our identity through performative actions that we understand will be reciprocated.  We encourage each other to manifest ourselves through aestheticized action.   In the case of art it's pretty obvious.  In the case of "being ourselves," well...

I've been dealing a lot with the notion of the performative lately.  In writings on experimental music, on contemporary discussions of drawing, and in social theory.  Foucault gets at it in his work on "limit experience" and "expression."  When you manifest identity through performatives, you are creating the very thing you are referencing, or as one theorist stated "[performatives] allow for language to "objectify" its own praxis."  For someone like Foucault, and Will, in his comment about becoming an individual again, or being set free through immersion in a recording medium, a limit structure can rip out the subject from it's action, and as it's identity collapses, that subject can actually manifest and identify itself on it's own terms once again.  Wittgenstein says a version of this when he talks about "rules," although it was in his own time's context.

The fact is, most people don't actually take this opportunity.  you are defined by choices in terms that they collectively agree upon when you actually accept these terms.  When you think the freedom of the marketspace is articulate enough to get by on, then yes.  Capitalism is hell bent on occupying all territory accessible through performative identity.  It is not an a priori, but a thunderclap, filling in every pocket ripped apart before it with heavy air, following right on the heels of the lightning.  I guess it doesn't really matter where your identity gets formed, and by who, and dependent on what.  I just feel like when every action we identify with is metonymic, then our performative actions should at least strive to collapse statistical identity.  Any recording medium basically deals in digital statistics anyways...  Our state of affairs seems to be growing wetter:  borders are melting, and most of our identities can be translated into other modalities with no loss of energy. The inscription of identity in the mediums afforded by branding, marketplace, (black market included) and displacement in accepted aesthetic mediums will blend into a neutral gray..  every individualism is accounted for and neutralized as long as the mechanisms for inscription and performative identity are interpreted as articulate and liquid.

I think all we can do is attempt to call the slick face of integrationist-postmodernity's bluff as much as possible.  Point out the stretch-marks of sexy hybridized networks and bend the circuits of the newest synthesized solutions.  The situationist games of detournement and recouperation have blended into one.  Total inscription is one hope.  I hope!  here's to inverted utopianism! anachronistic high modernism!  misplaced social geometries!  two eyes becoming one! and of course the deep structure of the vayne.  i miss you all!

Comments

[William]

If you're interested in the notion of the performative, be it in art or philosophy or whatever, perhaps you should check out the following books: Judith Butler's "Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative" and Amelia Jones' "Performing the Body/Performing the Text"...I was given the opportunity to see Jones' speak on the subject of the Australian body/technology artist, Stellarc, when she gave a jobtalk at Stony Brook...We wanted to give her the job, but I think she was a bit wishy-washy on the subject of living on Long Island and bailed on us after the offer was made...Oh well, it's a good book, nonetheless...I highly recommend it - very helpful in piecing together my Schwartzkogler paper...Anyhow, I can feel the Fifth Season upon us as well...I don't know if I should see how long it lasts or head to more temperate environs...I think I'll wait it out, though...

[jordan]

I've been slowly and often futily ploughing through "A Thousand Plateaus" by Deleuze and Guattari and today I happened to read the chapter called "How do you make yourself a body without organs?", which I think is literally about this recent line of discussion of lifestyle, choices, praxis, etc. It's actually so full of pertinent comments it's difficult to clearly relay them all, but all try.
The basic project of the book seems to concern a "plane of immanence", speculating about the possibility of a fused subject/action, whose desires and pleasures aren't seemingly internal qualities which either determine or are determined by external regimes, rather the desires synch up with broader patterns. The idea is a "body without organs" (I'm sorry, I can't attempt to fully qualify what that means in this comment) dissolves it's own internal constitution to meld with a total body of without organs.
"The field of immanence or plane of consistency must be constructed. This can take place in very different social formations through very different assemblages (perverse, artistic, mystical, political) with different types of bodies without organs. It is constructed piece by piece, and the places conditions, and techniques are irreducible to one another. The question, rather, is whether the pieces can fit together and at what price".
And:
"Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels, thresholds, passages, distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor".
And:
"We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and ta the place where we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the body without organs reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities".
It's all fine and good to postulate some "melding into the ether" of social articulation, which all this is. But I think that doens't always bear discursive fruit. the interesting thing about D and G is they emphasize desire over choice (and, consequently, the dissolution of choice). Choice is acquisition, with reasons or causes. That leads almost to problems of infinite regress, searching for what determines what, when, how...their principle of desire is not an inner want of certain goods, experiences, but looking at motion, where desires flow into others on a continuum. Action MUST deal with strata of style, capital, etc, but only by rocking that boat will we be able to dislodge random flows which produce little escapes, mutations.
I'm also reminded of Barthes discussion in "empire of signs" of Japanese "authenticity", which is different from the western "removal of all masks" idea. Sponteneity can sometimes only be achieved (like Rob said above) through narrow constraints, ritual, and, I think, style, capital, etc..

[rob]

hey buddy. glad you dropped the d&guat. the desire strand has come to absorb a role similar to will to power, but thanksfully updates it in terms of passivity as well. desires cannot often be helped if they are honest, which ties in to your cautionary tale jordain. milleplateau is definitely a new type of utopianism, updated for pomo cynics who long for modernity's attitude. I can't argue with their desires, much, but i am always skeptical of someone so convinced and convincING to so many folks... aint never that easy. even if it's hard. and wilbur i am familiar with the Amelia Jones, if not well read on it. i've been getting into the meat of it with some of pat's economic theory he sent me. it would be nice if he could drop in on this, but he seems to be pulling a bruce wayne at the moment. anyways, they often deal with the social imaginaries, and most of those things are extant only because of performative action; problem is people treat things like the market and economy and culture as if they are distinct natures, third person entities with some sort of essential desire that is conscious in there. as Lyotard said, they are "intersections of many clouds..." or something to that effect, but definitely not supernatural beings. like romi.

[jordan]

Rob,
I had similar mistrust for D and G from the outside, but after getting into it's extremely good reading, way more than the fashionable phenom it seems. The "easy" part of it seems to be in its reception: I see very few people quoting or using extensive parts of it beyond the "Rhizome", which is just the introduction. I'd highly recomend it. But, it may function well for me in this way because I don't need it to posit any claims, I'm just soaking it up to use in my dissertation about my paintings. A more concrete social discourse could justifiably write it off as decadent second-wave deconstructionism (the authors all but as admit as much), that kind of language run amok.

[Ben]

Hi gents: hope you're all well and miss these kinds of discussions! I'm in the filth season over here in Ireland and just stopped into an internet cafe (they exist in their plenty over here) and have set up camp for some delirious assertion-making and blog-droppings. I've read with interest the above comments and have come realize that I don't know what anyone is talking about (including me), even though I enjoyed it, sort of like flexing my lips in different directions. Is the real question something about individual agency amid choiceless and changing givens (or desires or power) that people absorb like sponges absorbing fluids? I think identity is interesting, especially when I'm walking along and all of the sudden think, "Who the fuck is some person named Ben Roosevelt, and what is this organism I'm inhabiting that appears to be moving its feet."

I like this quote:
"I think all we can do is attempt to call the slick face of integrationist-postmodernity's bluff as much as possible."

The body without organs is interesting as an idea, too. I think biological and agricultural analogies, metaphors, etc. have become quite popular, haven't they? Rhizomes, mutations, fields...I am suspicious of my identity and my own ability to determine my lifestyle and make choices, but then I wonder what/who it is that is experiencing this suspicion and placing these thoughts into my being and can I somehow govern the flow of these thoughts? And more than that, even if it is a delusion, is it better to think I have some agency than to resign myself to none, in which case I've lost my agency whether it's real or unreal.

[Patrick]

this shit's better than cspan.

[Elizabeth]

Is that good or bad?