Just 'Cause

Allow me to, if I may, present a little statement about the "meaning bubble", and the associated undervaluing of "the real".

Which is, an odd thing for me to be thinking about, considering the fact that I'm trained in philosophy of the semiotic and psychoanalytic persuasion. I'm also a writer. These facts mean that more often than not I'm preoccupied with the "symbolic" aspect of things. Looking at life, objects, words, and systems, and trying to figure out exactly what they "mean".

The search for meaning, either in a greater existential sense or in a more pedestrian, everyday way, is after all a great part of human life. Confronted with great spectacles of reality, whether it be violence, leaking oil wells, or technological lust sweeping a culture, there is a lot of fodder for such quests.

The world has long been split up into two categories as part of this process of trying to figure out what the world means. These categories are the realms of the material, or real world, and the meaningful, or ideal world. The world of things, and the world of words. In other words. These categories help the process by distinguishing between what we are attempting to describe, and the description itself. It's taken for granted that description can never get as close to the real thing as the real thing, because the description is, by definition, not real.

But then, as we get into the technical details of the difference between these categories, we see that they rely upon each other. It would be impossible to come up with the words to describe the real without the real existing, and the real would not exist for us in any sensible, meaningful way if we did not have words to describe it. We've achieved some sort of balance--that is to say, the realm of our ideal minds and symbolic data function in conjunction with the real world of physical material, defining a binary manifold of conscious experience. These two categories unite, giving us "existence", or "being", or "the phenomenal world", or something like that.

And there have also been attempts to find the "kernel point" in this bifurcated system, the point of original categorical separation, as it were. Whether this be a particular symbol, or a particular logical construction that is the basis for all others (Lacan's Symbol or Kant's Transcendental Logic), or the fundamental aspect of reality that is replicated in each physical and mental action (Marx's Fundamental Theses, Freud's Unconscious, Deleuze & Guattari's Desiring Machines), or some super-nominal hyper-real meeting point between the two categories (Merleau-Ponty's Flesh, Heidegger's Dasein), these theories hopefully posit that there could be a simple machine of some sort, a lever and fulcrum, from which we can begin to move the system of our world and how it attempts to mean anything for us, within an example mechanism that is relatively simple to understand.

Or maybe not. Because these various deployments of the categories, the disavowal of the categories entirely, the smashing of the idols and the forging of new categorical gods, and all the rest seems to take place over and again every so often, whenever there are skilled smiths in either material or ideas who are willing to pick up the tools. It is all suggested, and repudiated, proposed, and then debunked. All well and good. Part of the process, you know. Nothing like tearing everything down and rebuilding it, or watching something break and fixing it, to get a better idea of how it works. Or at least as good of an idea as you are going to get. Because it will break again. Or it will build itself again. The only consistency is the attempt to find consistency by watching the phase changes.

I was, at least until recently, pretty consistent in my domain on the ideal side of things. My wordy work on the subject of meaning was/is, ironically enough, based in ideas of most kernel-like aspects of the duality residing somewhere in the material realm. In other words, I was all about finding other words for saying that the material was the basis for our meaning through words. Even words are, in many senses, considered material of their own. I know, right? Well, you can spend a lot of time thinking about things in this way, and it keeps you busy.

But this was before I became a visual artist. I didn't want to be a visual artist. But, as M told me, "you are building an installation in an art space/gallery. You're a visual artist now, whether you like it or not."

Besides the fact of building something real with my hands in a certain place signifying that I was now a visual artist, all of a sudden people were asking me what, what I was building, was supposed to mean. What is it? What is it supposed to be? What did it mean to me, what did it mean to other people, what did it mean to other people other than certain other people, and what should other people tell other people about what it meant? If there was ever an indication that I was, in reality, a visual artist, it was that now I wasn't making something, I was making meaning. Or more directly, I was making something that manufactured the expectation of meaning within other people. They looked at what I was making, and expected meaning. They looked at me, as the person making the object, and expected me to translate the meaning for them, and to answer their questions about it with purposeful answers.

And the ironic meaning of this is easy to appreciate. For a few years now, I've been writing. That is, carefully building strings and codes of ideas into long, winding songs of meaning, that while ostensibly are for entertainment, have subtle hints and insinuations, like all good writing should (in my estimation), at some sort of larger system of meaning for us as thinking, perceiving, intending, conscious beings. Even though when I can convince someone to read some of my writing, they normally say something like, "cool story", or "good description, but the plot didn't really go anywhere". All that meaningful theory work, ignored in its subtlety. But then I grab a glue gun and 5000 cardboard tubes and start building a great big something-or-other, and all of a sudden everyone is looking to you for answers about the metaphysical structure of the universe. Maybe they don't care, or won't understand, or maybe they do. But mostly they just want to hear you say something. Work out some sort of meaning, to justify the material thing you've done. So they can understand what you did, and take a position on it maybe. Disagree, or applaud. Hey, did you guys know I write books too?

Of course we wrote an artists' statement. Hell, if somebody wanted me to WRITE about the sculpture, I'd put together five-thousand words in about 1/100 the time it's taking to do the same to the tubes. I'm not going to pass up the opportunity to paste some words up on a wall next to a physical monstrosity that might lead a few people to actually read something I had a hand in writing. A goal of writing is always to have someone read it, regardless of what the writing intends or what effect it might have. But of course, our statement had to be something that defied comprehension--not out of an attempt to make the meaning more abstract or obscure--but something that trumped the desire for meaning to begin with.

Because the thing we were building was not about meaning. It was about something real, taking up space, forcing people to interact with it, without necessarily knowing what it was. In this way, you might say that the meaning of the structure was for it to be VISUAL ART.

Which apparently, is something rare and revolutionary in this day and age. You ask any artist what their art means these days, and you get a proselytizing speech falling somewhere between confession, lecture, and YouTube response video, a kind of an absurd work of art itself, tripping over the process of being meaningful in the attempt to be oh-so-very meaningful. It's called an "artist statement", for goodness sake. As if by being an artist, you were necessarily making a statement. As if meaning, whether personal, philosophical, esoteric, or political, was the valuing commodity by which we understand art in the open markets of our minds and culture. As if the commodity fetishism of High Culture art sold for high prices necessitated a mirror of "real meaningful value" among the Lesser-but-in-some-ways-more-real-Culture, negotiated in the currency of complicated philosophies, intense, internal spirituality, and popular political causes. These currencies being more valuable than say, for example, craft or process. Or, aesthetics. Whatever that used to mean.

This is why I didn't want to be a visual artist. I didn't want to be part of the system bankrupting the power of the real's unspoken meaning by slapping labels and theses all over it; I don't want to be a member of the invading army of "meaningful" artists, writing their name on the world and telling you how to consider it from now on. Not to say that I think there is anything particularly holy about immediate perception. This is not the Gospel of Thomas here, refuting the god of heaven in favor of a god of the body. I'm not trying to sell you a new idol. I'm just a guy with a lot of cardboard and a glue gun, and I'm putting up tubes here. Just 'cause.

But then again, of course there was stuff I could say. If I wanted to. I've spent over 60 hours so far, and probably will commit another 40 or so, putting up tubes inside a room. I've had plenty of time to think about the tubes, whether I'm thinking about what they mean, or just considering them as things in my hands. I think about where I'm putting them, though it is generally a random process. So there is meaning, somewhere. As much meaning for me as there is for anyone else walking into a room and seeing several thousand cardboard tubes arranged in some sort of crystalline structure. So how can this "real" meaning, that is, the free meaning that develops naturally any time a human considers his or her surroundings, replace the "ideal" meaning that is dictated by artists, critics, or theorists trying to analyze the development of meaning, as meaning? Is one meaning more authentic than the other? If not, then why does it seem like they are constantly vying with each other for domination of the meaning rubric? Why are we so worried about the hows of interpretation, if there are always several ways of creating or interpreting meaning? Or is the "how" the realm of meaning deeply tied into any process of discovering meaning from our environment? By the very act of perception are we also analyzing the methods by which we perceive?

And now I'm back at the beginning, which is analyzing the history of the exegesis of heuristic methods, and delving into the abyssal asymptotes of semiotic theory. Which, for me anyway, is probably the best place. Because I could go on about this for pages, and spin around in circles until everyone but me is dizzy, or until everyone but me is clearheaded. Depending on how you look at it.

But, I can tell you this, and you can perceive it to be a conclusion, if you like. When I do visual art, I'm making something with my hands, and I'm sure as shit not building it out of words. When I'm messing with words, you'll know it, even if you skip out after two paragraphs and go back to looking at the tubes. Call it whatever you want. Hope it's entertaining for you.

Mules of Semiotic Capitalism

From the NYT:

“I don’t see other graffiti writers as my competition anymore,” B.N.E. said. “Now I’m going up against the Tommy Hilfigers, Starbucks, Pepsi. You have these billion-dollar companies, and I’ve got to look at their logos every day. Why can’t I put mine up?”



I like to describe Facebook particularly, out of the dearth of social media, as "Acquaintance Spam". Sure, they're people you know--but the feed gives you want more information that you'd ever really want, from people you are socially required to "friend". And my Facebook account (set up ages ago, used primarily as a White Pages) has a funny way of forgetting my email settings, and re-signing me up for notifications. Kind of like AT&T.

So if we are encouraged, socially, to promote ourselves, or to sign up for mailing lists of social advertising, why shouldn't some one desire to be their own brand?

And if you are really designing a brand, you want to do it right. None of this trashy, reality TV, Tia Tequila crap. Start over fresh. Clean lines, contrast. A recognizable, pronounceable acronym. Helvetica Neue. (That's actually his font.) Start local with the street teams, go global, make it viral. In a media culture, you are what you see.

Oh, and hide who you truly are. This is the first step of corporate, non-accountability. If you really want to do guerrila marketing, act like guerrilas. Face masks, omnipresent, anonymous media threats disseminated through your network. Anybody got a problem? Refer them to a spokesperson. Until, of course, Fortune wants an interview.

My only question is this: if this is capitalist marketing nostalgia/mimicking, then where is the surplus value? Where is the profit, derived from the gap between the production cost and the consumption expenditure? If
this is marketing, where/what is the market?

As a good Marxist-Freudian, I'd probably feed you the line about expenditures of the unconscious capital of dreams, and taking surplus off the relations of the production of desire. Yes, yes. We've all read Capitalism and Schizophrenia, to the n-th plateau and back. (You haven't? What are you doing here? Go! Now!)

But maybe this is a flawed iteration of the (now) eternal logic of capitalist production. Maybe, just maybe, there is no profit. Sure, Mssr. BNE gets his own art show, but he could have defaced corporation logos and made a buck without slapping stickers everywhere. What does the brand sell? Who makes what the brand sells? Who buys what the brand sells? Nothing, nobody, and everybody. In the case of Facebook, Facebook scraps off a buck on advertising, just like selling space on the side of a truck, driving nowhere, delivering nothing, using (almost) no fuel. But what was I tempted to buy when I saw that Susie B. from way back when suggested I reconnect with Jimmy H.? I don't know. I was annoyed, but that was it. Was I just... tempted to be... social? Is that a product? Who made it? How do you use it? There are no answers to these questions.

Maybe capitalism has spawned off non-breeding children. These mules of capitalism look like capitalism, act like capitalism, talk like capitalism, but make nothing. Except, that is, more of themselves. Social capital doesn't exist. It is a hand feeding itself. If you're making money off of social capital, you're actually making money off of real capital, while the social just looks on. The mule may pull a load, but what is it as a species? What is it's species-consciousness? Its poch is a bastard; it is a species with an endless generation of one iteration.

Symbols may pull products, but this is only symbols, doing nothing but symboling. All over the place, with each other, replicating, but only ever to the zeroth power, to the infinite extent of n+0. It's an echo, it's a shockwave, it's a whirlpool. It's like trying to map the surface of the ocean. It's the fractalized image of the depth of cultural noise. It's the ambient electro-magnetic sound of the universe, emanating from our own heads and then back again, the simultaneous transmitter and receiver of the static, programming itself into a feedback loop entity of semiotic reality. It's the meaning of $700 billion dollars in the context of the dollar menu.

I'm not about to try and predict the future of capitalism with any certainty (at least not in THIS blog post). But it seems to me pretty obvious that if monetary capitalism was ever to go into decline, if the GDP was ever to flip into steady negatives, and our surplus value was to shrink... (I mean, it can't just go on for ever, can it? Even in a debt-centered, inflationary system?) ...if this ever was to happen, the social, symbolic side of capitalism would continue to grow, as long as there are the machines to do it, that is, the people to consume and produce haphazard, metastasized semiotics. Media may need investment, but the investment in meaning is you and me. It doesn't even need a return to survive. I can keep writing and writing, pasting my name all over the surface of the world, and I have no margins to meet, and no investors to please. You could do the same, and maybe we would read each other's work, or maybe not.

Once the mule is possible, there's no beginning and end. The extent of meaning, it's borders, are negligable if nobody is measuring. There is no compulsion to reproduce and evolve--any re-creation will happen spontaneously, as another instance pops up. There is no linear hierarchy, no temporality, only the fact of existence in expression. Filation becomes mere praxis. There's no piety in praxis. There's only interest or ignorance, and it doesn't matter which. The aesthetics of the rust belt will determine decaying infrastructure's own future use. People will move into libraries, and homes will become archives. All works, all lists, thoughts, and all records will be simultaneously incomplete/complete.

You could ask a mule what it's on earth for... and you could ask a word (or three letters) the same question. Rhetorical questions might as well be the new cold fusion.

Covering Literary Language...

Despite the large amounts of time that I seem to stumble across, squandering this wealth on the empty pleasures of my RSS reader, there is no way that I ever have time to read all the things that report their interesting tidbits to me, begging me to try their subtle delicacies.

Maybe this is why hedonism is considered a vice; no matter how much you commit yourself to pleasures, there is no way you could consume all pleasures available.

Anyway, back to the RSS feed: I almost didn't read this one; the articles normally available online for non-subscribers of the NYRB are little reviews, or letter replies to other articles I didn't read. Normally I just scan it for the titles reviewed, hoping to remember them later when I see them reviewed again, or possibly delve deeper if it sounds particularly interesting. Unlike, for example, the TLS, which I read each article, meaning that I have a backlog (currently, eleven articles) that causes me no end of anxiety.

Zadie Smith's review of Netherland and Remainder, for some reason, I decided to read. I knew neither of the works nor authors, and Zadie Smith is not really a impetus to me, either. But all the same, so very glad that I did.

The essay is long, but very detailed, going beyond the substance of the two reviewed works to more of a signpost in a certain thread of literary criticism: lyrical realism.

I'm not going to delve into lyrical realism. For one thing, I'm not sure if entirely understand to what it refers. (I often have this problem with the various genre's of lit. crit.; I understand much more of the mechanics discussed than the supposed rubrics under which said mechanics are distributed.) Much more than that, I enjoyed those mechanics that she was describing.

Before I say anything about the article content-wise, I just wish to recommend it. It was a very nice article. Strangely enough, I don't have any big contention with it, either way. Simply put, it was a nice read, for any who are interested in literary criticism. A little thought-provoking, but not too much.

Of course, there is a reason that I am writing a blog post about it, so I must have something to say. Here it is.

This may be the truest words I have read regarding the terrorist attacks on 9/11:

"There was the chance to let the towers be what they were: towers. But they were covered in literary language when they fell, and they continue to be here."

If there is one statement that gets put into the history books, attempting to provide some sort of closure or reflection about the attacks and what happened afterwards in this country, this should be it. As I re-say in my own words now: it could have just been an awful, violent thing. But because it had begun by meaning more than just that, it continued to mean more than just that.

I doubt Zadie Smith was intending such historical gravity when she wrote those words. She was discussing the symbolism and meaning, both intended and unintended, through which such an event is represented in literature, specifically to her target, the book Netherland.

"It's a credit to Netherland that it is so anxious. Most practitioners of lyrical Realism blithely continue on their merry road, with not a metaphysical care in the world, and few of them write as finely as Joseph O'Neill. I have written in this tradition myself, and cautiously hope for its survival, but if it's to survive, lyrical Realists will have to push a little harder on their subject. Netherland recognizes the tenuous nature of a self, that "fine white thread running, through years and years," and Hans flirts with the possibility that language may not precisely describe the world ("I was assaulted by the notion, arriving in the form of a terrifying stroke of consciousness, that substance—everything of so called concreteness—was indistinct from its unnameable opposite"), but in the end Netherland wants always to comfort us, to assure us of our beautiful plenitude."

By metaphysical she means, I would venture, 'with consciousness towards its being/self.' It would be easy for any person to write about 9/11, and say any number of things. But writing about things with the knowledge that what we are writing changes those things is a much harder task, and as such, often falls far short, and is just as often derrided as 'post-modernism' or some other pretentious fad. Netherland, according to Smith, succeeds at both, 'just writing', and 'metaphysically writing'.

"Netherland doesn't really want to know about misapprehension. It wants to offer us the authentic story of a self. But is this really what having a self feels like? Do selves always seek their good, in the end? Are they never perverse? Do they always want meaning? Do they not sometimes want its opposite? And is this how memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent, lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really Realism?"

Now, this in itself is no more than a nice, idealistic bit of writing, like most criticism. In other words, it may be general easy to write about what writing means, but it is far more difficult to write what writing means in the course of writing it. A reversal, perhaps, of the problem of lyrical realism that Smith is considering, back upon literary criticism itself. Writing, like the content of Netherland, seeks the authenticity of the self. But if one sieze upon the self too whole-heartly (with too much reverential authenticity) then you may wake up to find that the self one clings to is not the self at all (be in an aporia, an other, or whatever else).

I might cryptically add: self-doubt is only one way of discussing the difficulties of writing while writing. But to explain: writing about needing, yet doubting, reality is one way to write about reality while at the same time acknowledging that writing is not, literally, reality. But: it takes more than questioning reality to be able to deal with (non-)reality. Hence, the problem with folks who depart too far from convention in order to question it. In order to write about not-writing, one must still write!

Right? I would hate to sum up what I mean about writing with reference to a tragedy, but here we are, and so it goes. In Smith's two sentences about 9/11, she sums up most completely what I feel is the truth about our modern lives (including our history, and our writing).

Things could be simply awful, and not mean anything. But they already did mean something, and that is why they must continue to do so, for good or bad.

Furthermore, that is why things will continue to be awful. It is impossible for us to abstract certain deaths from the meanings attached to them. Then, it is impossible for us to attach meaning to certain deaths that are already in the abstract. We kill millions because of the deaths of few; we kill to prevent death; we hate and despise death yet seek it with that desiring, tongue-hanging incest-lust that has made our most stable civilizations the arena of social upheaval and mass-destruction. It could just be some dead people, but instead, it was already a symbol; death was already a tragedy.

"The stage is set [in Netherland], then, for a "meditation" on identities both personal and national, immigrant relations, terror, anxiety, the attack of futility on the human consciousness and the defense against same: meaning. In other words, it's the post–September 11 novel we hoped for. (Were there calls, in 1915, for the Lusitania novel? In 1985, was the Bhopal novel keenly anticipated?) It's as if, by an act of collective prayer, we have willed it into existence."

"As if" willed into existence. But it was not willed into existence, even though everyone may be kneeling in prayer. Real life, or whatever it is that realism is trying to access, is the same way. Our lives are so stuffed with meaning that we couldn't help but try to reduce our orgiastic oceans of symbols into thin, seminal-fluid streams of prayer towards the singularity in the sky. And, with so much meaning in the way, we were clearly going to be wrong. We were wrong before we ever invented writing. We were post-modern before we were modern. And we were dead before we ever lived. What rises to the surface is only what is happening now. Each tower was covered with symbols before it fell; when I saw the video, I thought how odd that there was so much paper in the air, drifting everywhere. But these were massive office buildings, designed to hold, sort, and make all kinds of papers. It was already inside, just waiting to be let out.

I suppose that's it; no real clever twist conclusion from me. Anyway, thanks Zadie Smith, for those two lovely sentences. I've been waiting for somebody to put it so well for seven years.

Oh, and the literary crit. isn't so bad either! Let's just be careful of the ways in which we try to access reality, right? But I suppose that's a post for another time... next time I promise not to fool you into reading an entire post about 9/11 and literary criticism and metaphysics by suckering you in with a little light banter about RSS feeds.

Logic: wooo!

This statement is true.
This statement is false.

Between these two, logic is born, and logic dies. While it is easy to simply proscribe the second statement, by saying that it is "illogical", the fact is that the basis by which the first statement is "logical" shows logic to be a fallacy.

Both statements have meaning. The meaning of the first statement proves logic by completeing the circle. The meaning of the second disproves it by breaking it. If you can say that the first statement, in that it is a meaningful statement, has a logical meaning, then you must admit that the second statement has a meaning, despite the fact that it is illogical. Paradox is still meaningful.

Therefore logic is merely a game, and meaning is completely independent of logic. Logic is the same as saying: "The first rule of the game is that there are rules and that they are meaningfully true, including this one." Sure, why not? But you haven't proved the existence of meaning, you have only utilized it.


The greatest part is, that all of the above would be pretty much meaningless if it was not logical.


(Derrida is pretty sweet.)