Hi Randall,
I never thought of myself as alarmist, but more like Lovelock's later
writing on the decay of Gaia, a witness; we're all witness. One can just
protest; it's useless, but what else is there? To make works of art that
injure no one, that might heal or awaken as well as entertain (to misquote
Jane Fonda). What is it one is facing, what is the face?
An alarm indicates an emergency; this emergency, the anthropocene, has
been building for thousands of years, only now it's increasingly violent.
And I feel, living in the United States, we have a deep stake in
ignorance, and continuing ignorance (Florida for example banning the use
of the phrase "climate change," Bill Nye getting heckled for explaining
the moon shines by reflected light in Texas). This is tragic, because we
waste so much of the world's resources; because we've become a military
state inside and out; because we tragically fail to understand China, the
Mid-East, Africa, just about any place on earth outside the country (most
of my friends still don't know the capital of Canada). Someone elsewhere
described the U.S. as a wounded elephant, which renders it incredibly
dangerous. So the question for me, is, how do we approach this (an odd
parallel with how does one approach the Other, or the Face, resurrecting
Sartre and Levinas for the moment).
The net has everything and nothing to do with it. When I think of the net
and its layers of abstraction, its protocol - and then think of black
bodies in the line of fire in this country, black and brown bodies mining
for the sake of our smartphones, etc., everything becomes entangled -
there aren't three layers, there are bodies on bodies, there are
mechanisms of control and interconnectiions which temporarily seem safe
and enclaved, but aren't etc. etc. So again, what is to be done?
I talk about these things with every presentation I do; I do work around
them, knowing full well the work fails, just as the word/world fails for
us.
I did a talk/presentation at Pratt a while ago, dealing with all of this,
and the following, which I'll end with (I've gone on too long), summarizes
my thinking here - the immediate occasion was the violence of ISIS and
other fundamentalist groups -
"Facing, what?
If we face evil, comprehend it, examine it, watch those videos,
does that reduce us to catatonia? Does that empower us to act?
Does it reduce us to fear and trembling, to terror?
It's not enough to say, this is the way the world has always
been; the world, now, is not as it has always been.
Or is it enough to insist on the long lens, reach, of history,
to insist that the past itself will teach us, that we can learn
from it's - our - "mistakes"?
Another approach - this has nothing to do with us; this is the
work of a miniscule number of people; this is the work of the
made, the depraved, criminals; this is the work of the lost; of
the disenfranchised; of this or that group. But is this not also
our group, isn't there, yet, the shade of Adolf Eichmann, the
normalcy of evil? Then what is this?
Or this is for or against or the result of, neoliberalism - but
this has always been with us, this resides within us, this
defines us, at least a part of us.
Or that this is the result of social media, of technologies
that spread everything everywhere, this is the result of the
disseminated messenger. But social media, oral histories,
ballads, newspapers, tablets, rumor, gossip, languagings, have
also always been with us.
Or that ethology plays a role, sociobiology, that this is part
of our primate heritage, that we may or may not overcome. Yes,
and then what?
At the heart of all of this - absolute violence and anguish,
textual and oral inerrancies, symbolic acts and always
totalization, the violence inherent in language and its
recoding of histories.
At the heart of _all_ of this, death, and the erasure of death."
Thanks for the response,
- Alan
On Mon, 9 Mar 2015, Randall Packer wrote:
@Alan, your stream-of-consciousness alarmist-poem speaks to the power of
awakening, the ultimate role of the alarm & the alarmist. You allude to
the idea that the alarm is an agent of transformation - ?walls torn apart?
- I have the impression that the alarmists of the world serve a deep need
to remind us, to awaken us, rattle us, to create fissures in our thinking,
to dissolve the boundaries in order to reorder & instigate change.
And yes, the clock is always ticking, the flow of time itself, but until
the alarms & alarmists of the world sound their warning, we may just fall
deeper and deeper into a forgetful sleep. Thanks for the wake=up=call!
Randall
On 3/9/15, 1:18 AM, "Alan Sondheim" <[email protected]> wrote:
(so many of these videos, modified from localhost, macgrid, secondlife,
the
sides of a cauldron located in the brown Cave, cavern, the stirred
uncanny-political, among the imaginary, illusion-clock, universal death,
we're
here for the infinitesimal, the walls are torn apart, howling, then for
the
rest of us a 'conceit' or 'metaphor,' the brutes!)
alarmed clocks in the universe we're hard at work bringing you
the news
http://www.alansondheim.org/clock1.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/clock.mp4
http://www.alansondheim.org/clock2.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/clock3.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/clock4.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/clock5.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/clock6.png
run like, because it's like, clockwork. let it go viral in the
world, bacterial clockwork, moved, unmotivated, sound the alarm,
no tulips, the look of love alarms, the walls are torn apart,
earthquakes, because we've spoken through alarms in dark Clara
night, plumes, because of meaning, know well there may be none,
o that simulacrum of repetition from your interior raising the
alarm, o that simulacrum of repetition from your interior
raising the alarm sounding in a workshop while a family watches
her with long pointed ... swept with confused alarms of struggle
and flight, the floors covered with meat, death, the dogs howl,
the walls are torn apart
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web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 718-813-3285
music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
current text http://www.alansondheim.org/tc.txt
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