10/14/2012

The Desiring Subject

“In the very moment when he digests the object, the artist is digested by the society that has already found a title and a bureaucratic occupation for him: he will be the future engineer of entertainment, an activity that has no effect whatsoever on the equilibrium of social structures. The only way for the artist to escape co-optation is to succeed in unleashing a general creativity, without any psychological or social limits. This creativity will be expressed in lived experience.” Lygia Clark

How is to unleash a general creativity, forces which they could by definition, by character, by semotics slip beyond the capitalist paradigm? It is hard for us to sense that a lived experience it is the presence of bodies who touch, listen, hear and feel one another. The effort of a revolutionary today shouldn't be the production/consumption of the object, the text, the term, the idea that will only criticize the existing system, but the realization of the paradigm's shift, its possible existence in the present moment in her life. It is by the micro-revolutions: at her working place, with her family, her friends, at her neighborhood, by manifesting her need to speak, to listen, to create relationships, links, to refuse the bureaucratic scheme of a certain form and to be vulnerable. Always starting at the present moment beyond psychological and social limits: the shift then comes unexpectedly and it is not from the perspective of the what was and what it will be but the how it is now. It is more of a time declaration than a spacial one. [ When a child plays, when a lover courts, when an artist creates, they are not transmitting information but creating “a richly expressive situation in which a whole series of semiotic components are involved”*, temporarily freeing themselves from systems of expression that are founded upon the principle of individuation. Capitalism refuses to acknowledge the existence of these semiotic components, refuses to accept a mode of communication whose essence is desire. Instead, it wants, it requires people to express themselves in ways that are in accordance with the division of labor and only tolerates expressions of desire that the system can recuperate; capitalism demands that desire be “linearized, quantified in systems of production” and this is because “the best way for capitalism to insure semiotic subjugation is to encode desire in a linear way” In any given workplace, for example, workers are forced to abandon “the totality of what they are”, they must leave their desires and problems at the door. One’s desires and emotional life are completely ignored; workers are asked to work, not to be a desiring subject. Capitalism forces us all to suppress what we feel, and it refuses to acknowledge our “entire perceptive semiotics” in the name of productivity and profit. Capitalism forces us to take up a kind of identity which propagates the stultifying forms of social stratification that keep the bureaucratic-institutional machine in operation.] Revolutionaries today are those who create and who confront the institutional machine because they still claim the existence of communications whose essence is desire, ever thinking in terms of reaction but those of action. 
[..] : segment from 'this is not a blog',  microfascism, semiotic subjugation and collective arrangements of enunciation, posted on December 6, 2010 
*quotes are from the 'A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

10/05/2012

A cat only with a head

We embody the cliches of our societies. The point is how to break the clishes by realizing how we are being our own cliches and that won't happen if we are always adding the critique to the discussion but by accepting the fact of not being in the position of the Other not because we don't accept the Other but because we won't ever be the Other.

And when I say ourselves I mean our bodies, our desires, attractions, tensions, fears, celebrations, intentions and those are not a social construction and contract but an emotional force that I find stronger and more relevant to work upon. All the forms, texts, lines, tactics of acceptance and embrace of the Other by and through the critique, through the creation of terms like homophobia, racism and feminism is for vomit the same as how easy the Other can get exorcised by laws, behaviors, salaries that have no terms, language and 'proofs' to define them.


I see that we can only be reactionaries just because it is easier and it doesn't take us anywhere. I mean it doesn't make us to confront our own selves and our own limitations.


Can we start making and doing what we want and not what we are, what we are named of by the Other or for the Other?

It is like we are a cat chasing our tail but the only thing we have is a head.

10/03/2012


                    All Kinds of Mountains Inside a Bowl

7/26/2012

SALOON IN THE CLOSET with Fia Backstrom and Kostas Saxpazis, SAT 7/28/12, 8pm


The world's most famous equation
C-M-C : M-C-M
The closest i can come to 'doing nothing'
building piles of dirt in the woods before heavy rain.
Set the alarm
Etcetera
Someone ought to tell them there's no where to go.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
food for delivery 
 

6/03/2012

Mona Lisa Effect / Fia Backstrom, I am so US, 2014


What you are reading now have been written in notebook on iPhone iOS7 and iPad iOS7.1, and Macintosh Powerbook 2.2 GHz Intel Core, OS 10.7.3 in text edit and Microsoft® word 14.0.0 (or micro sugar word as spell corrected). Notes were taken on unlined ReWrite brown carpet cartage cartilage cardboard cover notebooks using Pentel p209 0.9 mm graphite pencil. They have been printed on an Epson Stylus NX415 using Epson color cartridges series #69.
14.0.0., 7.1, 2.2, 7.0 NX415, 69, p209, 0.9, 2.2, 7.1, 10.7.3, 14.0.0
Version num
Number
Key word
Bit Size
Quanta
Remake/remodel

In 1991, I was writing on a word processor IBM ps2 - Personal system vs. Impersonal system
I have not written on a typewriter since 1989 - I abhor the linearity that the typewriter forcer thinking into
I abhor
You abhor
He abhors
She abhors
It abhors
We abhor
You abhor
They abhor

Grammatical linearity of Inclusion and exclusion
From one to many through the We/Them logic
a linear logic of the iphone

linearity as in: 1 2 3 456789101112131415232425 36374245556768808182 5 7 89 90
Writing non-linearly, shifting the order of the lines for natural development to increase empathic identification or reading backwards as in socially awkwards

Diagnostic criteria:
1. Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, ranging from abnormal social approach and failure of normal back-and-forth conversation; to reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect; to failure to initiate or respond to social interaction.
3. Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships, ranging form difficulties adjusting behavior to suit various social contexts.

Our autistic culture – our lives in number
correlation is any statistical relationship between two random variables or two sets of data and refers to a broad class of relationships involving dependence.
associativity is a binary operation in propositional logic as a valid rule of replacement for expressions in logical proofs
an asymptote of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as they tend to infinity.
# the pound sign, a sign for quantity, becoming or has become a data set, the/a hashtag - a mobile signifier
delineating a new kind of space, drawing geometrical/statistical vectors, operating both spatially & alpha-numerically
creating a cool kind of contact, to connect:
content with content
context with context
correlation with correlation

but not:
association with associativity
and not assimilation to assymptote
nor ass to an ace

our lives in numbers - our numerical universe
scales and its abstraction
materiality and presence = specificity

linearity as in: A b c d e f g is a non-infinite universe Acqd
A as in asymptote - a distance tending to infinity as it approaches 0
B as in bureaucratic language or bucolic bullshit
Cc: me
Critical capital
Cultural capital
Creative capital
Credit capital
Credit card
C c c c c me – making value together

Quantifiable
Quanta
Data – she

Go glee a word generating intelligence - so much language, who takes responsibility as in a call for ethics
I quantify my life
I have problems expressing empathy
Autistic social disconnection
We quantify everything
We as a culture and a society

The extreme generalization of the word society
The violent generalization of the word culture

We use data
We us data
We US data
NSA
ATT
FRA
forsvarets riks anstalt – the national defence department

Ataka
British National party
Danish People's Party
Flemish Block
Freedom party
Freedom party
German People's Union
Golden Dawn
Hellenic Front
Hungarian Guard
Livable Netherlands
National Alliance
National Democratic party
National Front
Northern League
National resistance
People's Party
Popular Party
Progress party
Swedish Democracy
Swiss People's Party

BNP
DPP
DVU
FN
FPO
LPF
NPD
PVV
REP
VB
VMRO

I am so US...
I am so U.S.
You Swedish
Me U.S.

Swedish people are blonde
Blonde people are dumb
All swedes are dumb

All dumb people are racists
A liar’s paradox or political rhetoric

The danger of generalizations
We is a generalization

You and I and fascism
We and fascism
Our fascism

We are implicated
Are we implicated
Implicated we are
Implicated are we?
Affirmative questioning

You can always tell a person who does not have Swedish as a primary language from the inversions, the melody and the use of the articles (en och ett)
In Sweden white suprematist violence has increased with 500% over the last ten years
500 10 10 500

Our lives in numbers – our quantifiable universe
Race recognition - by humans
Face recognition - by machines

Translation: text into numbers into images into code into text
The verifiability of everything

face recognition and racial biology                                                              
micro data and macro data
small data and fast data
miniscule data and excessive data

The minute movements of a face through degrees of deviation
The social production of a face – language as empirically and socially acquired - face to face, body to body.

It's a question of scale
Of the continuity of intrinsic qualities of feeling we can now form but a feeble conception. The development of the human mind has practically extinguished all feelings, except a few sporadic kinds, sounds, colors, smells, warmth, etc., which now appear to be disconnected and disparate. In the case of colors, there is a tridimensional spread of feelings. Originally all feelings may have been connected in the same way, and the presumption is that the number of dimensions was endless. For development essentially involves a limitation of possibilities. But given a number of dimensions of feeling, all possible varieties are obtainable by varying the intensities of the different elements. It follows from the definition of continuity, that when any particular kind of feeling is present, an infinitesimal continuum of all feelings differing infinitesimally from that is present.
Face recognition software is now used to analyze and humanize the emotions expressed in the faces of animals – disregarding other registers of exchange
This is the Autistic quality of civilization, we need face recur ruin recognition to verifying trithineds truthiness for data analysis of facial movements
Emoticons as visual substitute for emotive text, a metacommunicative pictorial representation of a facial expression
The state department for race biology research was founded in 1922 and continued until 1975. Much of its early research on Ural-Altaic Languages was colored by attempts at justifying that European peoples east of Sweden were Asian and thus of inferior race, justifying settlements and racial hygiene. Swedish research was an important ideological precursor to the later Nazism. semi circle
semi semi
semi colon and anti semite
same = laponian –> the Nordic Native, indigenous peoples of the north

"You don't sound like that at all" cab driver reminded me: “The way you speak, I thought you had been here for 2 yrs most. How have you been able to be here for so long a still talk like that?"
I am reminded I am just a visitor in this language – remember me on this computer
bar bar bar – blah blah blah – blabber blabber blabber
Barbarization of language - the word is Roman for the North African Berbers

The Old English personal pronouns were replaced by the Scandinavian forms They Their Them dom during the Anglo-Saxon age
Exporting otherness - A racial pollution of language - they - them
a migration going both ways.

How can we/they/one utter xenophobic rhetorics believably with so many linguistic bastards and impurities. How can we speak without pushing those immigrant words through our vocal cords past our white teeth?
Transference is about pronouns. Transversality is a we/here M-dash they/there
Give and take are also Scandinavian immigrants. The word Data means given in Latin. It is possible that Data dates back to Old Persian Dadatuy: let him give or from Sanskrit Dadati: offering gift
articulation – to say it out loud - from the tongue, through the lips, in one breath
inhaling something that is not mine

ultra subjective utterance
subjective/objective speech
machinic/objective muttering

To speak as an I and engage as a we                                                       
articulation & accent
speech language pathologies
language screening assessment
slipping between languages
meaning in translation, cadence, and rhythm

syncopation - a discovery of the mouth
rhythm - not melody
rhythm - not velocity
there is a difference between melodic and percussionist

tongue twister
ready in rhythm
foreign syntax
erotic syntax
unconscious syntax
exotic syntax
contemporary syntax

Globish & Fascism - everything starts to mean anything else
I have no verbal responsibility I am a foreigner
immigrant syntax - Globish for everyone - We are all barbarians
Barbarian English vs Queen’s Accent

My dear barbarian, you seem confused spraying swastikas on mosques
there is a pill for this - there is no cure for that

personality disorders should not be confused with (but may be the result of) problems accounting with acculturation following immigration.
In the bit/In ha bit this place/inhabit this language
let it live through you
I feel my language moving through you/your body
I feel your language moving through me/my body

Rhymes as transformational gradients, allowing for motion of meaning in and out of word units. Sliding from one morpheme into another, searching, while misplacing manifest meaning, the rhyme is an emotive movement, morphing into the other, passing as in becoming somebody or something else, noun into verb.
Morphology is a branch of biology dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features.
Suppose a surface is part red and part blue; so that every point on it is either red or blue, and, of course, no part can be both red and blue. What, then, is the color of the boundary line between the red and the blue? The answer is that the color of the surface is the color of the surface in the immediate neighborhood of the point. I purposely use a vague form of expression, it follows that the boundary is half red and half blue.
BORDERLINE personality disorder
- vague circumstantial, metaphorical, over elaborate, or stereotypical thinking
- restricted interpersonal contact
- the border where I end and you begin is unclear and flexible

language is the bridge between us all
connection
corerction
co-ercion
co-erection
contemporary euphemism
contemporary erection
to be in your emotion - commotion
to be in your language - collective
to be in your body - collateral
the border between body/language/emotion
spoken language supports us towards others

curiosity and security
certainty and security
somatic symptoms

Association – dissociation and feelings of emptiness
inhibition in interpersonal relations
inadequacy and social ineptitude


Place your welfare in the hands of others
(excerpt from performance: Aphasia as a Visual Shape of Speaking - on A-production and other language syndromes.)

5/17/2012

woman-woman


Do you have any money?
Can you leave me here?

Car is passing
Dog is laughing
Cat is mumbling cat’s alphabet

She is out of the bed she walks at the kitchen naked.
She puts water in a glass
Her nakedness is thin. Contrast light blocked on white cotton curtains.
She leans on the table to write a note.

“I woke up early
and here is your credit card “

the credit card is on the table

There are oranges in the fridge, half bottle of milk, two slices of bread and a cereal bar. Eat something you look weak and desperate and the color of your lips is grey even when you’re sleeping

I made coffee, have some 

Can you hold on?

I am begging for a powerful golden force when you are asking me to still love you.  Death is around the corner. Every time I pass this damn bridge I check if there is light in your apartment. I can even see the mirror hanging on the wall at the corridor’s side.

Georgia Sagri, Tuesday, January 4, 2011 11:09 AM

5/12/2012

April 30th, 2012, 11am OWS Press Conference, Zuccotti Park, New York


As for today, April 30th 2012, 150 cities world wide have called for General Strike on May Day. 
 
It is not a matter of whether all of those involved in the General Strike can or even should come together under some ephemeral political umbrella to plot a shared course with clear, concise goals and agreed-upon demands. The truth of the matter is that the General Strike needs no demands. In fact, ideally it would abhor such a configuration, insofar as those of us striking out know full well that our own angers and desires far exceed any demands, or set of demands, that might be made. No laundry list of fucked up conditions, or of alternatives or solutions (which always precede, assume, and ultimately fail to attack the injustices they seek to address) can even begin to exhaust the range and scope of our rage.

Likewise, the Occupy movement, more and more openly transforms the tiring effects of excessively passive petition drives, letter writing campaigns, and permitted marches and rallies where professional activists are both literally and figuratively penned in, separated not only from their ostensible targets, but from one another as well.

We are the 99% therefore we need to creatively rethink what a General Strike means for us in 2012.

It means that:  
 
- We act collectively to establish new and inspiring forms of mutual aid and solidarity.
- We imagine how we go against effectively to the systems of racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, economic, political, and police oppression that are virtually indistinguishable from one another.
- We realize that many of us live in a “stop-and-frisk” world within which everyone is illegal (although some certainly more than others), and terms such as “police brutality” are increasingly recognized as redundant.
-We govern ourselves is acting upon social problems by our presence, commitment and by sharing the commons. We are open and public and we are not afraid to speak and act.
- We create new ways of being and living together, outside of wage and property relations; this especially means that we are thinking of ways to support those we work with, rather than those we work for or profit from.
- We start learning how to develop the strength and courage to view and treat our lives as they truly are: NOT NEGOTIABLE!

Most importantly General Strike calls for Infinite Strike and not just for a day of action because it calls for a social change. It calls for transformation and it is for each one of us to make that transformation possible on the streets, in public. We stick with each other and we do not compromise anymore on symbolic gestures but actual actions that promote and sprung our efforts. We make the city our playground and we abandon the places that oppresses us. We enjoy, we share, we change ourselves and others. We move forward.
 
This General Strike then calls for life and only by envisioning how our lives should be we can build this global General Strike.

From the May Day struggle that brought the 8 hour work day, to the people who want it all for all– 

EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE! GENERAL STRIKE!!
NO WORK! NO SCHOOL! NO SHOPPING! NO BORDERS! TAKE THE STREETS!

4/03/2012

The jacket I put on ( naked as I am )

Δουλεύοντας τη μη δουλειά / Working the No Work
Currently on view at the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, New York




All kinds of gazes ( the paper made glasses)

Just the gesture
saying with the foot
stepping with the voice
All kinds of devices
the pleasure of doing